The Fault In Our Stars - Book Review

I dedicated this entry to Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters, my favourite fictional couple.

SPOILER ALERT.
(like I'm serious, there are alot of spoilers so if you plan to read the book yourself then please just close the tab and pretend you never saw this.
DON'T SPOIL THE BOOK FOR YOURSELF.)

Funny, I've never wrote a book review before.

so here we go to my very first ( and lacking ) book review =)

Synopsis :

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.
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green's most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.

 Even reading the synopsis of this book, you'll feel attracted to see how the author will address their love and shape the characters.

and may I say that John Green has not disappointed his readers.

They say our destinies are written in stars and as I quote this book directly,

Never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves."

Were she better or you sicker,
then the stars would not be so terribly crossed
but it is the nature of stars to cross
...there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.
                                                              -The Fault In Our Stars, John Green.

This book is as expected, about life and death and everything in between.
At the starting, you're laughing at the humor and the metaphor.
In the end, you don't want the book to end that you read so slowly, almost devouring every word, afraid of the ending.

yeah, that's what The Fault In Our Stars is about.

Hazel was a 16-year old girl dying of cancer, or instead living with cancer.

and all she ever wanted was to leave nothing in the world so she wouldn't have to hurt anyone.

I remember precisely from the book when she called herself a grenade.

she wanted to just keep to herself so that one day,

if she bit it from cancer, at least the people around her wouldn't be so hurt.

Oh Hazel.

Augustus, on the other hand is around a total opposite.

He wanted to leave something for people to remember before he died.

He was afraid of oblivion.

He wanted to be remembered.

When I first started reading, I was certain that this was going to be a typical girl-is-sick-boy-is-sad-when-girl-dies type of story.

How very wrong I was.

If I could go back to yesterday, I'll laugh at myself and say, "STUPID".

Thank god I can't.

because when you come to this part of the story when Augustus went for a PET scan and finally told Hazel,

This is truly a moment when I think all his readers want to just bawl their eyes out.

DAMN OUR STARS.

I bet everyone who read the synopsis would think Augustus would be the one watching Hazel die.

but it was Hazel would watched Augustus died.

How life toys us around.

The book gives you healthy readers an insight on appreciating life,

it shows you how lucky you are when Hazel can't breathe well without her breathing tubes, or Augustus who had to live with one leg and finally died or even Isaac who lose his eyesight and was broken-hearted because of it.

One of the most heart-breaking moments in this wonderful book is when Hazel and Isaac wrote their respective eulogy for Augustus.

This makes me wonder when Augustus requested them to write eulogy for him.

did he know that he wasn't going to make it any longer?
Do people know when they are close to death?

My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because – like all real love stories – it will die with us, as it should. I’d hoped that he’d be eulogizing me, because there’s no one I’d rather have…I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician but I know this: there are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.

 "Some infinities are bigger than other infinities".

I think one of the best quotations of John Green.

I love how he beautifully describes the meaning of the line above with simple Mathematics.

There are so many beautiful quotes that John Green has written,

IT MAKES ME JEALOUS.

"Grief does not change you. It reveals you".

and I think one of the most popular quotes that almost everyone knows from TFIOS is,

dang. metaphor.

The saddest part of the book?

probably Augustus letter to Van Houten, the ending of the book.

Direct quoting.

Van Houten, I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently.Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.I want to leave a mark.But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.(Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.)We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other.Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invented anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox.After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse.What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers. 

and after that, Hazel monologues two sentences to herself which perhaps broke the heart of every single reader,

I do, Augustus.
I do. 

 

I seriously love the last paragraph of the letter.

 "Without pain, we wouldn't know joy", another quote from the book itself. 

Although their love was short and a painful one, they had their happy moments with their dry humor and I do look forward to the movie coming out next year.

Hopefully it will make a person as unemotional as me to cry.

yay.

 Oh Augustus.

so in conclusion, I'm going to reread "The Fault In Our Stars" again and just relive the moments one more time before moving on to my other books.
Definitely recommend this book to all of you,
packed with humour, family and emotions,
it's like a gift from heaven.

and indeed I agreed with John Greed,

There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.