The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

NPR subtitled this book 'Love in the Time of Cancer', which really does sum it up. John Green writes books for young adults, but he is not one to gloss over the more difficult aspects of growing up, and this book is no exception to that rule. here's the story. Hazel Grace Lancaster is a 16 year old who has had a well below average junior high to high school life. She was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 13, and she left school, never to return. When we meet her she is battling metastases that have rendered her breathless. She is in a kind of limbo, where she knows her condition is terminal, but the experimental chemotherapy is keeping the tumors in her lungs more or less under control, but the damage is done, she is on oxygen, and we know where this is heading. She doesn't seem particularly depressed to me, but her doctors send her to a support group and there she meets Augustus Waters. He was a wildly popular boy who had an osteosarcoma and lost his leg. But that is not why he is there. He is there to support his friend Isaac, who presumably has retinoblastoma, and is about to lose his second eye. You get the idea. All the kids have cancer. So they are all facing very significant illnesses and disabilities, which are usually reserved for adults. But the truth is that kids do face these things. Hazel and Augustus fall in love and support each other through the travails of their illnesses--unlike your usual high school love affair, they share Augustus' Make-A-Wish trip, for example. But the emotions that they experience are what you would expect for their age. It is just that the situations they grapple with are usually reserved for those of us who are closer to our twilight years. I have a childhood cancer survivor, and all my children have friends who have either had cancer or have siblings. They know children who have died. So this book resonated for me. Life threatening illness in a child is hard for parents and children to grapple with, and the author did a good job of demonstrating how parents might allow their terminally ill children to do things that you wouldn't allow your average 16 year old to do. It was heart wrenching at times--I read it on a plane, and at points I had tears rolling down my cheeks. I was reassured when I read reviews written by people who do not have a childhood cancer connection have the same response--but it is a good kind of sad. the kind that makes you thing, and approach your life with a kinder vision. This is not an uplifting book. There are no miracles here. But it is a book true to it's subject.