Book Review: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Publisher: Penguin Books Australia
Publishing Date:  January 11th 2012
Genre: YA, Contemporary
Format: e-ARC
Page count: 313 (paperback)

My rating:

My first thoughts:

LOOK WHO JUST GOT THIS ON NETGALLEY.

Thanks to Bekka (Pretty Deadly Reviews) for bringing it to my attention and Kelly-Jane for emotionally manhandling me to read it.

Here is a very brief and unfinished list of things I will cry over:

• Kittens.
• Family movies
• Whenever anyone dies in a movie. Anyone. Even if they’re singing as they’re dying.
• Whenever anyone is heroic in a movie – take Wall.E for example. I cried twice.
• The opening sequence of UP had me bawling like a baby. We’re not allowed to watch it in my house.
• Commercials with baby animals.
• Commercials to save the wildlife or starving children in Africa.
• Doctor Who (except the Eleventh, because the writing in those series sucks)
• Weddings – even if it’s a fictional wedding.
• Funerals – even if I didn’t know the person.
• Babies.

I asked my husband to help me remember which books made me cry, and we came up with this very short and incomplete list:

• Lauren DeStafano’s Wither* and Fever
• Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall
• Anne McCaffrey’s The MasterHarper of Pern
• Cynthia Hand’s Unearthly
• Heather Dixon’s Entwined
• Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games
• Kristen Cashore’s Fire
• Amy Kathleen Ryan’s Glow
• Maria V Snyder’s Inside Out
• JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Alexandra Bracken’s Darkest Minds
• Kat Zhang’s What’s Left of Me

It doesn’t take a lot. All it takes is beautiful writing and a strong emotional connection. *In the case of Wither, it doesn’t even have to be a connection to a character I like.

I suffer from depression and I’m an over-emotional person. A close friend recently passed away from cancer. I had hoped that this book would help me deal with that grief, but all I got was a depressed sick girl with no personality and a boring douche guy, and their obsession with what happens after a book they both read ends dramatically, and how the guy would do absolutely anything for the girl and how sorry for herself the girl feels. Maybe it was realistic – I can’t be the judge. And I didn’t hate it, I just had absolutely no connection to any character. Neither did I find it boring – I was simply detached, and cannot see the merits of either of the lead characters. This does not get a ‘Cancer Perk’ 5 stars because it’s a cancer book or because the leads were cancer sufferers. I was just not invested.

This book did not make me cry.

Not once.

Not a sniffle.

Not a welling of an unshed tear.

Just meh.

I’m not sure why Penguin Books Australia were giving this away on Netgalley (one year anniversary?), but that’s where I got my copy from.

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