''The Fault in our Stars'' by John Green
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Gnome-Review that barely scratches the surface because I don't have much to say (nothing new on this blog LMAO).
The Fault In Our Stars gets an 8 on the Josh-Index for getting my hopes up and then kicking me in the balls. Metaphorically.
The book is about cancer, and it's not super-cliché or anything. Sure, chronically ill girl falls for chronically ill edgy boy. This story did it nicely somehow.
Hazel Grace is cynical, she's rude, she's funny, she's kinda sweet and she seems like she smells like daisies. Hazel Grace is seriously depressed because her cancer makes her feel like a burden, and Hazel Grace loves reading and has barely any friends (we're so different fosho). Well, one day in a self-help group she meets this August guy and holy muffins, he's hot. Sexuality is fluid and August makes me want to kiss him on his lips. I'm not gonna spoil the plot here, because it's actually worth reading, but I feel like mentioning that the book ends horribly. It guts you and it spits on you. No happy endings, all loose endings. Everyone who used to be happy is either dead, blind, drunk and/or grieving. My friends have read it, they all told me “Noo why are you reading TFOIS you’re gonna cry :(” because people seem to hate the ending, but it really didn’t bother me all that much. I’m just dramatizing it for my easily-invested audience.
Aside from the okay-written ending, I like the way the story explores what social isolation does to a person, how it writes love. That's really my favourite part about TFIOS. How it writes a love story out of a girl's perspective is pretty good even though that's the only type of book that I avoid STRICTLY. The narration in here isn't gross-out cheesy or overly obsessive, it genuinely shows her romantic appreciation for August, and she acknowledges his flaws, and she's relaxed with it, and has other interests and stuff outside of her relationship with beautiful smug sexy August, who is everything I strive to be. It does the "cute girly romance story" without making me want to rip my skin off. Props to the author for that.
TFIOS has a solid 8 on the Josh-Index, and I'd like to add, as a footnote, that I read it in the beginning of the school year because I saw it in a shop window and it reminded me of my middle school classmate whom I was friends with who used to sit alone on the stairs at break reading TFOIS as I watched them from across the hallway. Sounds creepier than it sounds. We were cool, and they liked Kaczynski before he was commonly accepted as based and redpilled. I haven't heard from them in three years but I'm fine with that. I'm glad I read the book because of them though, it was fun.
Also: Someone told me that TFOIS is a “horrible disgusting book” because the author apparently “hates kids with cancer” and “is a terrible person” etc. etc. and I'm pretty uninformed on that so please don't come after me, if that's actually the case and the person isn't making shit up the way that they usually do. I'd be happy to listen to someone explain it to me, but I'd like to disclose that I like the book because of how it wrote teenage love.
If you’ve gotten this far into my review I’d run away with you, leaving our old lives behind to go live in a little house in the German Alps, tending to a garden of orange flowers and a small group of cows. Hold my hand, fellow tumblrian. I appreciate your time.