The main character of the book is Hazel, and she has lung cancer. She's sixteen and has been out of school for three years, but she takes community college classes and reads a lot. She opens the story by telling us her mother decided she was depressed, " presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death."(page one, TFIOS) To get her out of the house, her mother sends Hazel to cancer kids support group. Here she meets Augustus Waters, and the rest of the book is dedicated to their love story and their fight against cancer, with a spontaneous trip to Amsterdam thrown in.
Considering the cult following this book has, I'm not sure I dare say this, but... I didn't really enjoy this book. I suppose I should be expecting a crowd of angry pitchfork and torch-wielding youths at my door any minute now. The thing is, I can understand why people would like this book-it's clearly marketed towards teenagers, and it has all the emotion and romance and angst any adolescent would want. But here's the thing about me; when something is so obviously supposed to be sad, I can't really get absorbed in it and connect to it because I know what it's trying to do. That's probably a pretty big reason I couldn't enjoy this book.
John Green banks too heavily on the cancer and death factors of his book to get the reader to connect and become invested. To me, it just seemed like an easy way out of actually building a meaningful plot. I mean, everyone makes such a big deal about TFIOS not being a "cancer book",about it being about these characters, but can I ask: if you were to take the cancer aspect out of this book, and were left simply with the characters and ideas, would you care about either? I wouldn't, because I don't think either were particularly well-written or explored well. I mean, I didn't like Hazel, or connect to her. She didn't really have any interesting thoughts, and her whole clever and witty persona started to wear on me after awhile. AND ALL THE CHARACTERS TALK THE EXACT SAME WAY. From Hazel to Augustus to the parents to the novelist Van Houten-they all sound like John Green. And as for any kind of subtext or ideas, what were they really? Every little metaphor or symbol was straight-out explained by the characters in the book-there was nothing left for the reader to think about or interpret on their own. So if these aspects aren't quality, all we are left with is the cancer aspect, which leads me to believe the whole book was a "cancer perk" , an idea Green talks about in the book. Cancer perks are special things cancer kids get because they have cancer. The acclaim this book received was a special thing it got because it had cancer. What really annoyed me was that the cancer didn't mean anything. When a character in a book is physically ill, we as readers are trained to look for the sickness to symbolize some other problem that is perhaps mental, or of the heart. Physical sickness is never just physical.... Except in this book.
Another aspect of Green's story that kept me from enjoying it was how formulated it was for it's audience. Like I said before, Hazel's attitude is so obviously supposed to mirror that of the average teenage girl. But by trying so hard to do this it really just makes her boring. And the number of slapped-in pithy quotable lines really got to me. Just these moments of pseudo-deep thought that felt like they were drafted separate from the book and inserted wherever the author saw fit. On top of that, the number of references to authors and philosophers really held up the story. I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald when I'm saying this, and he's good to compare to. The man was obviously very well educated, and as an effect of this tended to allude to many authors, philosophers, classical works, but they flowed as a part of the story; they enhanced the text if you understood the reference, if you didn't you just skipped over them. However, John Green puts all these names and such into the story in such a pretentious and contrived manner, and then assumes the reader doesn't know what he is talking about so sets the story aside to explain them. It really did start to drive me insane.
Overall, I didn't consider TFIOS to be a particularly well-written book, and I think part of the reason it has sold so many copies is the propaganda surrounding it. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love John Green as a person, and I watch Vlogbrothers religiously, so I was really let down when I found out what sort of an author he was. He has such a following I bet people feel a sort of duty to read his books. I can understand how people liked it, but this just wasn't the right book for me. I think I would recommend it just for cultural literacy at this point.
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