Book review
WARNING FOR LOTS OF BAD LANGUAGE AND SPOILERS
Ok so here’s the thing you need to understand about me and this book. I never, ever thought I would read this. I never thought I would read anything by John Green. It just never seemed like my sort of thing. I’ve always read loads of fantasy and sci-fi, contemporary is quite a new genre for me. The Fault In Our Stars always seemed too chick lit for me and too much of a tear jerker so I just assumed it wasn’t for me.
I take it all back.
Are you kidding me?? I can’t even cope with how much I love this book. I listened to it on audiobook which I honestly think is the only reason that I even read it. It was on offer and I wanted to try out a fiction audiobook rather than just sticking to the autobiographies I had been listening too (see branching out all over the place!).
I went in to this honestly thinking I would hate it. I had so many preconceived ideas about what I did and didn’t like that I was adamant that I would spent the whole time rolling my eyes and thinking how stupid it was. I didn’t do that. Not at all. Because Augustus and Hazel are so fucking pure it hurts.
Here’s these two kids, facing down this horrific, arsehole of a disease with honesty. There’s no bullshitting about it. They acknowledge all the so called ‘cancer perks’ that they get, the things they get away with for having cancer and they also acknowledge the side of cancer that rarely gets shown. The painful suffering.
I don’t mean to say that normally it’s glossed over, but look at it this way. At the funeral (more on that later…*already crying*) all these people that weren’t there for the pissing the bed, for the vomiting, for the crying and the moments where you give up because you just can’t handle the amount of pain your body is going through anymore…all these people that only saw him on his good days, who were only there when he felt well enough to see people that weren’t his family or his closest friends, they talked about how bravely and hard he fought, how he faced down death with dignity and grace. Please. Give me a break.
I’ve known three people that have died from cancer and in my experience not one of them felt dignified at the end. Yes, they fought, hard and bravely…until you can’t anymore. God I’m rambling. Look, my father in law died from cancer. It was brutal. It was like Augustus. It came from nowhere, it progressed like a mother fucker and by the end, this mountain of a man, this big friendly giant of a man I had loved could barely lift his head, couldn’t eat, could barely speak. He was strong until the end but I wouldn’t say he felt dignified. Going from the being an active fifty something man to being bed bound in your own living room I’m sure felt like shit.
Basically what I’m saying is that this fucking book gets it. It doesn’t sugar coat it. This is how it is. Someone can battle cancer for years and stay just ahead of it to have some semblance of a life, just like Hazel, and some can be decimated by it in less than a year. Not everyone pulls through. Not everyone goes into remission. And it has nothing to do with how hard they fought or how strong they were. Cancer doesn’t give a shit about that because cancer is a bastard.
So anyway, the book.
I’ve read a lot about how the kids in this book are pretentious and shit. I hate that because I think they are awesome. Hazel is so defined my her cancer at the start of the book because she can’t get away from being the kid with cancer. The reminder of it is on her face 24/7. Everywhere she goes, people know there’s something wrong with her. Her mother has seemingly rebuilt her whole life around Hazel. She doesn’t go to school with people her own age and she feels like there is a gulf between her remaining friend and herself. She doesn’t want to go to support group because, yes she meets other kids going through the same thing, but she also has to bare witness to cancer taking them one by one. But going there led her to Augustus. The main thing I loved about Hazel is that honesty. Her narration was real, there was zero sugar coating. Every word of this book felt like a confession: a confession of fear, a confession of love, a confession of anger. I loved her for that. I also loved the parallels between herself and Anna from “An Imperial Affliction.” The more you discovered about the book, the more you understood why Hazel was so obsessed with knowing what happened next. She needed to know what became of all these people that had been linked to Anna’s story, she had to know they were ok, because it was the only way she could accept that the people linked to her own story would be ok once she was gone. Hazel knows she isn’t going to get better and she knows that when she dies, it is going to devastate her parents. She puts up walls so that she doesn’t make more friends to hurt, she keeps her distance from her old friends because she thinks it will ease the pain of her death and she tries not to fall for Augustus because she doesn’t want him to go through it all again. But what Hazel comes to realise is you can’t control how other people feel. You can’t stop people from loving you and you have no control about how they feel or deal with your death. Hazel Grace is perfection and I honestly love her.
Augustus is going down as one of my favourite contemporary male characters of all time. I just adored him. I love he way he spoke, I loved his maturity and the way he face life in general. Mostly, I loved his love for Hazel. He was well aware that she was pushing him away and he was are of the reason behind it but he didn’t let that get in their way. He spent time letting things grow and showing her what they could have. He was her friend first and foremost, and isn’t that what we all want our significant others to be?
I’ve had to read through a lot of character deaths that have broken my heart (I’m looking at you JK Rowling) but I think Augustus’ death broke my soul a little bit. And yeah, some of it was he speed with which he went downhill and how it mirrored that time in my own life when we lost my father in law, and some of it was because, fuck me, I had built up my defenses for Hazel dying and when I realised what was going to happen it was too late. It’s just a reminder that cancer is cruel and it doesn’t care if you’ve beaten it before, it could still come back for you. It doesn’t care if you are young or old, male or female, rich or poor. It’s a giant dick.
I barely made it through the fake funeral. I listened to the actual funeral in the car on my way home from work one day and I cried…I cried a lot.
I can’t ever watch this film because I’m not putting myself through that shit twice.
I could go on and on about this book. It’s been months since I finished it but I still think about it a lot. But lets just leave I as this: I loved this book because it was honest, real and heartbreakingly perfect.
* * * * * * * * * * *
I can’t put it into words right now. I need some time to process this. My heart and soul both hurt and have been healed and I don’t know how to properly convey that just yet.
- Goodreads rating – 4.16
- REVIEW – Gemma ♕ Bookish Gems