You’re probably on this blog because you either love reading books or write them (the second is conditional on the first), so I thought I’d start sharing with you some of the books that I love. No, not just love – REALLY love. Like I wish I’d written this gah my heart kind of love. The kind of books that make my own writing seem useless in comparison, but also inspire me to push myself to do better. To start off this series is a book I only finished reading last night but I have already started to re-read. Yes, it’s that good.
Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.
Man, this book. It’s difficult to even form my gushing torrent of enthusiasm and love for this perfect little bundle of words into a coherent set of sentences, but I’ll try. For a story about two teenagers with cancer, this is a seriously funny book. As in, laugh out loud, call up your friends to read them excerpts funny. There’s been criticism about how funny it is, but those people are missing the point. Illness doesn’t take away a person’s right to humour. In fact, illness demands humour, especially when it’s just two teenagers trying to live a life as normal as their bodies will allow them.
Their humorous outlook is just one of the reasons I fell in love with Hazel and Augustus. These are characters that you can’t help but root for from the get-go. They are flawed and real and quirky and thoughtful in that way only teenagers can be, and their voices were so spot-on that I was taken back to my own time as a teenager (it feels so far away, though it was only a few years). I believed everything they said, every thought Hazel had. When painful things happened to them, I cried as though it had happened to my own friends.
That’s the beauty of this book – it makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time from the hilarity and beauty and pain of it all. And isn’t that just like life?
Here’s a little quote from book that reflects exactly how I feel about The Fault in Our Stars: “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
READ THE BOOK.
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