Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm not a Nerdfighter. I don't really follow John Green, so I don't love him and I don't hate him. I'm just a graduate student who has been inexplicably fascinated by cancer since middle school. A lot of my friends and family started telling me about this book and how I should read. "Just don't read it in public," they warned, "because you WILL cry." Being a sucker for sob stories and cancer stories, I gave it a shot. I didn't have a lot of expectations for it. I just heard it was good and decided to try it for myself. This book tries way too hard not to be a "cancer book," which is described in the novel as an uplifting story of someone with cancer who fights bravely until the end, starts a foundation to help other kids with cancer, and then dies. Honestly, I've never read a cancer book like that. And books about cancer are a lot about books about dogs: someone is going to die. And when I saw it was stage 4 cancer patient Hazel performing a first-person narration, I knew it wasn't going to be her. The cancer in this book is WAY too convenient. I have never had cancer, and my father's skin cancer was taken care of with one surgery, but doesn't having cancer- especially such an advanced cancer- mean a lot of doctors' appointments? Neither of these kids experience anything beyond mild fatigue until the author wants to evoke emotion. Hazel does have a scare near the beginning of the book, but she's fine and goes to Amsterdam THE NEXT WEEK. These are kids who have, out of necessity, spent most of their lives in total isolation. They've been in hospitals, lost limbs, been face-to-face with death, and yet they aren't afraid, or exhausted, or coping with anything at all. They might as well have bronchitis. Another reviewer who was actually diagnosed with cancer points out that they scoff at group therapy (realistic) but stop there (unrealistic). Until one of them actually dies, they just quote poetry at each other. That brings me to the biggest problem of the book: people will say over and over that having a terminal illness makes you grow up faster and be wiser and more observant, etc, but these kids do not have one shred of real dialogue. They don't act like teenagers at all. They don't act like realistic people at all. They quote books and poetry at each other and the AIRLINE lets them drink just so they can have some line about drinking stars. They put unlit cigarettes between their teeth and make out in the Anne Frank house and have sex and there's no sense of teenage awkwardness or anything. They're annoying. They're pretentious. And when you combine that with the fact that the cancer is just a crude device used to illicit emotion out of teenagers, I didn't cry when one of the characters died. I couldn't. I never connected enough to. The only parts of the book that came close to getting a tear out of me were the ones with Hazel and her mother. The mother is I guess a pretty typical portrayal of a "Cancer Mom" (they deserve the capitalization) who has become very protective of her child after, you know, the cancer the reader never had to deal with. The romance between Hazel and Augustus seemed to be built on notes taken from Twilight. How do they meet? He shows up at support group and stares at her. He tells her she looks like Natalie Portman and she quotes some existential stuff about oblivion from some stupid vaguely postmodern book (which is also a crude plot device) and it's love. That's it. She has some reservations because she has been declared terminal, but she throws those out the window because, well, he's hot and likes her. And also the cancer doesn't really matter. The book had some quotable stuff: Pain demands to be felt. Illness repulses. My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations. But it's shoved into a context that is unrealistic and forced and contrived ("why do eggs have breakfast exclusivity?" whines supposedly-teenage-Hazel). I have tried to write short stories about cancer patient. I only got close to being comfortable with the whole thing once. It's a difficult thing to do. Writing about an illness is almost impossible unless you've been there yourself. I'm not a cancer patient, but I feel like cancer patients are probably offended by this book.