Last year, a ninth grade girl in honors English wrote me a letter that said, "I want to read a book that makes me FEEL something." Well, she said a lot more than that, but the point is, I wish this book had been published already because this would've been the perfect recommendation for her. I'll have to find her this year and put it in her hands.
This book was A-W-E-S-O-M-E. Awesome. Like Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, and An Abundance of Katherines, John Green nailed this one and it won't let you down. It's officially one of my new favorites.
The main character is an intelligent, clever, witty seventeen-year-old girl named Hazel Grace who must suck her oxygen out of a tank because she's terminally ill with cancer. She's hesitant to start living her life when she knows it's limited by time but all this changes at the beginning of the book when she attends a Cancer Support Group and meets Augustus Waters. With a cigarette in his mouth that he dare not ever light, this young man takes her breath away, and mine too.
I'm not going to go into details about their relationship, as what happens between them and how deeply they're effected by each other is the basis of the entire book. But I will say this: this is not a cheeseball story like you might be imagining. It's deep. And it really makes you think about love and life through the eyes of someone dying. At one point I had tears flooding my face and I just wanted to hug my husband and tell him how much I loved him. (Of course he thought I was just being emotional and obviously didn't understand the context....but if he read the book I bet he'd understand.)
Read it. You won't be disapp
Good for: point of view, symbolism, characterization
Themes: terminally ill, love, death, living, overcoming obstacles
Would interest: boys and girls (but more-so girls because the narrator is a girl)
My grade: A+
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