Yuffie's Book Reviews

The Fault in Our Stars - by John Green

I'm going to start reviewing published books for anyone interested.

This is more a personal exercise to motivate me to keep reading and notes to help improve my own writing. Everything I say is my personal opinion, so please no one take offense if I absolutely despised one of your favorite books (which is likely since I'm hard to please....). In no way do I judge the writer or any of the book's fans in the least.

Here's my star rating system:

0 stars: I wish I could unread that
1 star: This was terrible. Who let this get published? Little to no redeeming qualities.
2 stars: More flaws than redeeming qualities, but it did have some significant redeeming feature.
3 stars: Not bad! There were some phenomenal aspects, but some of the flaws were so bad that I can't call this novel "really good".
4 stars: This was really good! I can't find much fault with it. Some great redeeming qualities that allowed me to overlook the flaws.
5 stars: This is so good that I will read it a million more times and dream about it and draw fanart for it and worship it's awesomeness forever.

Now onto the review of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green:

The writing was fantastic from a technical standpoint. There were some paragraphing issues that I can overlook. John Green is enormously talented at putting words together and has great humor (the line about Gus's hotness blinding Isaac and taking Hazel's breath away was insanely brilliant).

However, the storytelling is where this novel crashed and burned. There's so little conflict throughout the story. The cancer is there, obviously, but there's no conflict where the characters work to solve. There's no rising action, no climax, and even the ending seemed to drag only to end with no satisfying new revelations. In terms of that, this story is just flatlined. I heard a good rule of thumb is that at least 80% of the pages of a novel should have conflict, but there was barely 10% in TFINS. They both liked each other right from the first day they met, and there was only a tiny thread of guilt on Hazel's part because she didn't want Gus to suffer after she died. Then the tables turn and he dies, but it was done gradually over many pages, so there was just this impending sense of doom throughout without really giving that punch in the face impact of plot twists or excitement/devastation.

Which leads me to my next point: we were given fair warning to every. single. potential. plot twist. When Gus had a "surprise" for her, it was immediately apparent it was a trip to Amsterdam. She even expected it herself for several pages before he actually tells her, which made its impact so watered down and predictable.

The moment he said he was feeling too tired to have sex and fell asleep in the middle of it, I was like annnddd his cancer's back and now he's going to die. The rest of the book played out as predicted. That's the thing--every almost-plot twist in this book was predictable from the beginning.

The characterization really pissed me off. What 17-year-old boy talks like Gus? He talks like a 50-year-old English scholar, not a teenage boy who plays basketball. Same goes for Hazel. Both of their overly flamboyant and highly pretentious ways of speaking was a huge turn-off and incredibly unrealistic. Gus was just really annoying because of his grandiose style of talking, so I never really got to 'fall in love with him' in a way that made the romance 100% believable. The characters felt so pretentious and annoying to me. I was rolling my eyes at him after nearly every piece of dialogue. It wasn't until the very last page where Gus finally dropped that drawling voice and spoke like a regular person. Besides that moment, not once did he feel like a real person to me. Not once in the story did I feel he was a believable character--all because of his voice and the things he says. And his absolute perfection in everything except driving (having cancer is NOT a character flaw). GARY STU ALERT. Terrible, terrible characterization.

Despite a very thin, lack-of-substance plot and unlovable and unrealistic characters, I did shed a few tears during this. The ironic tragedy of Hazel not wanting to hurt Gus when she died, but ultimately he died first, was pretty emotionally loaded. I admit I really loved reading about Gus's pathetic G-tube catastrophe, seeing him puke all over himself, and at another point piss the bed, slowly grow thinner and weaker, needing a wheelchair and ultimately stuck in bed until his heart stopped, etc.

Overall, I think this was an okay book considering I read it in two days and stayed up until 3:00am reading (probably in hopes that an actual plot would sprout from the ashes), but there wasn't enough conflict to carry a novel, and the over-philosophical, extravagant/pretentious dialogue of Gus, but also of Hazel quite a bit, were a huge turn-off for their characters.

So not the best book ever written, but it won points for the great writing, and that ultimately gripped me despite the lack of major conflict and less-than-lovable characters. V for Vendetta references helped, too.

2/5 stars

So what did you think of TFiOS? Loved it? Hated it? Somewhere in-between? Share your thoughts in the comments below!