By Madeline Anthony, Audible Editor

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS BRILLIANTLY EXPLORES THE ART FORM OF BEING ALIVE

Reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is a young adult canon event that I would like to see continue from now until the end of time. Experiencing this story is as pivotal and thought-provoking as any awkward prom or messy first love. And much like the aforementioned events, this novel is likely to pull you apart while simultaneously healing you from the inside out—all the while making you laugh, cry, and generally feel more than you had realized was humanly possible.

I was first introduced to John Green in high school, when a girl I thought was unbelievably cool gave me her copy of Looking for Alaska. I devoured it in four days. The novel left me craving more of Green—his earnestness, his heart, his ability to make readers long to live inside his imagined worlds. The Fault in Our Stars was up next on my John-Green-binge-list, and I figured I was amply prepared for the experience, having just finished a tearjerker like Alaska. But alas, just as for every school dance, I wasn’t nearly as ready as I thought I was.

The Fault in Our Stars is, simply put, a total and complete sobfest—for all the right reasons. There isn’t melodrama simply for the sake of intrigue or death and tragedy to fill a sucker-punch quota. The story, which follows a pair of terminally ill teenagers as they meet and fall in love, is much more than your run-of-the-mill adolescent romance. You’ll immediately root for the two main characters, Hazel and Augustus, from the moment they meet at a support group for teens battling cancer. Both are wise beyond their years, the product of being forced to reckon with their own mortality at an age when most kids are only navigating high school. But they are also both teenagers, plain and simple, and it is in this juxtaposition that the story flourishes. The tale brings existential realities—things like the fragility of human life, the everyday acts we take so much for granted—and the deeply restorative power of love, in all of its many forms, front and center.

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