John Green The Collection

 Fifty years ago, when I was around the target age for books like [a:John Green|1406384|John Green|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1353452301p2/1406384.jpg]'s [b:The Fault in Our Stars|11870085|The Fault in Our Stars|John Green|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1632632557l/11870085.SX50.jpg|16827462], such books were awful things designed mostly to warn young readers about the evils of drugs. I've had no interest in reading young adult fiction but this book is an exception for two reasons. First, the author and I went to the same college. He graduated nineteen years after I did, but it was one of those small Ohio colleges that makes you feel a mild connection to anyone who went there. Second, the second main character, Augustus, has the same form of cancer that I do. He even had the same leg amputated though in his case it was when he was a child; mine was when I was in my late fifties.
 Writing about terminally ill teenagers is not a new idea. [a:John Gunther|68809|John Gunther|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1235985796p2/68809.jpg]'s [b:Death Be Not Proud|486298|Death Be Not Proud|John Gunther|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440036906l/486298.SY75.jpg|1321803] was published in 1949. In the 1970s, terminally ill young people became a staple of made-for-TV movies following the great success of [a:Erich Segal|15516|Erich Segal|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1202419115p2/15516.jpg]'s hugely successful [b:Love Story|73968|Love Story (Love Story, #1)|Erich Segal|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388812297l/73968.SY75.jpg|816372] and the movie it was based on. (Both came out in 1970.)
 Fault is a good book and even old sourpusses like me, more prone to think teenagers are no good than to sympathize with them, found the narrator, 16-year-old Hazel, a likeable and sympathetic character. There are a few choices I'd have advised Green against, like using all caps as often as Hazel does and, especially, descriptions of video game playing of any length, which dates a book fast for the young and alienates the old, but those are minor drawbacks overall. I would've avoided bringing Christianity into it as specifically as Green does as a means of broadening its appeal and its message, but Green is a Red Stater. The writing is simple enough that I, a very slow reader, breezed through it in three days, but it's not dumbed down. The characters make literary references any parent would be proud to see their kids get.
 If you find The Fault in Our Stars on you kid's shelf, reading it would be a good way to spend a few hours.
Excerpt:

 I woke up in the ICU. I could tell I was in the ICU because I didn't have my own room, and because there was so much beeping, and because I was alone: They don't let your family stay with you 24/7 in the ICU at Children's because it's an infection risk. There was wailing down the hall. Somebody's kid had died. I was alone. I hit the red call button.
 A nurse came in seconds later. "Hi," I said.
 "Hello, Hazel. I'm Alison, your nurse," she said.
 "Hi, Alison, My Nurse," I said.
 Whereupon, I started to feel pretty tired again. But I woke up a bit when my parents came in, crying and kissing my face repeatedly, and I reached up for them and tried to squeeze, by my everything hurt when I squeezed, and Mom and Dad told me that I did not have a brain tumor, but that my headache was caused by poor oxygenation, which was caused by my lungs swimming in fluid, a liter and a half (!!!!) of which had been successfully drained from my chest, which was why I might feel a slight discomfort in my side, where there was, hey look at that, a tube that went from my chest into a plastic bladder half full of liquid that for all the world resembled my dad's favorite ale.

Meh. A little too Sensitive And Profound for my taste, the characters unrelatably onedimensional, but I'm not really the target audience.

This book offered a fresh and a little bit surprising point of view to the thoughts and lives of young people suffering from cancer. I never would've thought about these things, especially from this angle, without reading this book, and that alone made reading it worthwhile. Simultaneously, this was a refreshingly light book to read.

I didn't know anything about this book before reading it, except that it was a popular YA title. I've also never read John Green. So I didn't expect it to be so well written. He clearly didn't interview anyone with a prosthetic leg and it's so heavy on the melodrama it really deserves three stars, but as YA it's four.

Picked this up on Audible due to good reviews. Had no idea what it was about. Didn't realise it was a young adult book. Didn't realise it was a tearjerker. I still enjoyed it but did find the characters of Hazel and Augustus a little pretentious.

Brilliant book. I don't give out five stars for effort, so you know I'm serious. Just read it.

I'd normally avoid a novel about teenagers with cancer in love, but my book group picked it. It was a compelling read, and dammit I stayed up late to finish it, crying.

For those of you living in a cave without access to internet or television, The Fault in Our Stars is about 2 teenagers living with and dying of cancer. It's sad. Not sad enough to make me cry, shockingly, because I love to cry at sad books and movies. Out of Africa makes me sob hard enough to throw myself on the couch wailing. But I digress.

If you don't know the story, I refuse to spoil it for you. Just read it. It's pretty good. And I have read the criticisms that Hazel and Augustus don't talk or act like typical teenagers. It's because they aren't. They are dying, they are a little bit hipster, and they have been forced to look their own mortality in the eye and deal with it. I can't imagine what that would feel like at 16, and I would bet neither can you. Their witty banter and interesting conversations are what kept me from the eye rolling, honestly. The part that bugged me most was her father. Please stop crying about everything around your daughter. Man up, dude. She's the one dying. It struck me as incredibly selfish.

TL:DR. Cancer sucks, and this book is sad.