I’m not entirely
sure what I have to say about The Fault
in Our Stars that hasn’t been said before. But I may as well give it a try.
The novel tells the
story of Hazel Grace Lancaster, a sixteen year old suffering from thyroid and
lung cancer. At a support group for other young people with cancer, she meets
Augustus Water, a cancer survivor, and the novel primarily follows their
relationship.
It is both a novel
about cancer and not a novel about cancer. I think the narrator Hazel’s
description of her favourite novel, An
Imperial Affliction, is apt here:
it deals with cancer, but ‘it’s
not a cancer book’. The Fault in Our Stars is not about the
main characters being strong in the face of adversity, although of course at
times they are both. What I like about the novel is that it’s more about the
people than the illnesses they have. It is, to me, not about dying from illness
but about living with it, about what’s left in life when its longevity is
threatened.