Archive for February, 2012

Traveling last week to California for work, I decided to load my Nook up with a few titles I’d been meaning to read: Midnight in Austenland by Shannon Hale, the latest installment of her modern Austen romance, as well as Jennifer Donnelly’s Rose books, particularly The Tea Rose. Despite the ease and compactness of the Nook, I grabbed one hardcover novel, particularly for those times during take-off and landing when your electronic devices must be silenced. But I also took this book because I had been dying to read it: The Fault In Our Stars by John Green.

If you know anything about young adult lit, you know John Green. Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, An Abundance Of Katherines… and on. Adored by many, obsessed over by rabid fans, his books are really good, great, funny, and oddly real despite characters that seem outside of this world. I had been warned in advance that his latest novel was a tearjerker, probably something I wouldn’t want to read in public, unless I wasn’t worried about the likelihood I would shed a tear, or many. But I decided to read, and read, and read and read, on throughout the whole flight to Denver, and then to Palm Springs, 30,000 feet high in the air, even when I could have turned on my portable electronic devices.

As I expected, The Fault In Our Stars, was a profound movement of a story with a wave flowing high and low, catching my mood and dragging me along every single line. I’m not writing today to review this book or give a synopsis of the plot, I simply felt like I wanted to share how this story felt to me. Hazel, Gus, Isaac, such intense emotion and soul, and compared to these dying teens, I felt like the pencil-drawn version of a full-color comic.

What did Green mean to say by naming his book The Fault In Our Stars? It comes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’” Are we beings of fate, destined to a life of living the path, the pain, the hardship that has been dealt to us, or is this fault formed in our stars just one of many given to all people, one of a variety of blips on the radar, something that, while not chosen, is given to us to use, respond, craft, mold, how we will? What is the fault in my stars that I let define me?

I cried, I laughed, and I enjoyed this unexpected journey that was a twisted path of life and death. I’ll eagerly await the film that has just been optioned, and eagerly await John Green’s next work.