The Fault in Our Stars

I have been trying to limit the number of young adult books I've been reading lately.  Seems I might be on YA overload right now.  But I made an exception for John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.  I'm glad I did.

My middle school years contained a lot of Lurlene McDaniels' books.  A LOT.  I still have them tucked away in a box in the closet.  We don't really have to talk about it.   The Fault in Our Stars started out a lot like one of those books.  A young, terminally ill person falls in love with someone.  Except this one had all the humor of an episode of Gilmore Girls (the first couple of seasons anyway....not the last couple that were kind of craptastic).

It was as up-beat as book about cancer can be I think, but also fast paced and had not entirely predictable plot lines (which is a good thing of course!).

My favorite excerpt from the book (complete with the reference for the book title):

'Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick, yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves." Easy enough to say when you're a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.'(p. 111-112)