I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I don’t even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and I wanted to smack Augustus Waters and also replace my lungs with lungs that didn’t suck at being lungs. I was standing with my Chuck Taylors on the very edge of the curb, the oxygen tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by my side, and right as my mom pulled up, I felt a hand grab mine. I yanked my hand free but turned back to him.

“They [cigarettes] don’t kill you unless you light them,” he said as Mom arrived at the curb. “And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see:  You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”

“It’s a metaphor,” I said, dubious. Mom was just idling.

“It’s a metaphor,” he said.

“You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances…” I said.

“Oh, yes.” He smiled. The big, goofy, real smile. “I’m a big believer in metaphor, Hazel Grace.”

Book Review:

Review by Judi Clark  MAR 9, 2014)

When I was in high school, Love Story by Erich Segal was THE book (and movie) that we were reading and quoting (“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”). It was a weepy love story, between Oliver Barrett (Wasp, rich Harvard guy) and Jennifer Cavilleri (smart, poor Radcliffe music student of Italian descent — and a smart mouth). From the first line of the book we know that Jennifer dies young in this epic star-crossed love story. It’s a cheesy, sentimental story, but still told in a way that makes it a compulsive read. (And didn’t we all love Ali McGraw in the movie!)

The Fault in Our Stars is a “love story” for our current teen/young adult generation. Like any love story, it is kind of “cheesy” … and not easy to put down. But this one is smart. I liked it a whole lot better than Love Story because it is cynical/realistic and its setting is far more accessible than the Ivy league town of Cambridge, Massachusetts with its star cross relation between rich kid and poor kid.

In The Fault in Our Stars, the currency isn’t money but health. Our star-crossed lovers meet at a church support group for kids dealing with cancer, “This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.” Hazel lives with terminal cancer and inseparable from her oxygen bottle; her life has been extended (but not cured) by a miracle drug. Augustus, who had the highly curable osteosarcoma has been cancer free for fourteen months, but had one leg amputated for the cure. He is not a regular participate of the group; this time he has come with his best friend Isaac, who has one fake eye and one real eye:

“He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you.From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Isaac shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.”

Hazel narrates the story with her unique perspective — she may be cynical, but she is not depressing — she’s just a realist. “Augustus asked if I wanted to go with him to Support Group, but I was really tired from my busy day of Having Cancer, so I passed.”

Hazel also likes to quote from her favorite book, “An Imperial Affliction” written by an American living in Holland. “AIA” turns the conventional “cancer kid genre” on its ear and Hazel (and once introduced to the book, so does Augustus) loves re-reading this book that ends mid-sentence. The plot of this book moves forwards on the hope that the author might one day answer what happens to the other lives in the book after the main character dies.

Considering the subject matter, this novel is snappy (not sappy) — not at all morbid, although it is sometimes sad. I loved experiencing the world through Hazel’s eyes and getting to know these kids and seeing them live life preciously knowing that it can’t go on forever.

I think today’s generation are being served a far better love story than mine. The repeatable quote from this book? It is:  “Apparently the world is not a wish-granting factory.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10,691 readers
PUBLISHER:	Dutton Books (January 10, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Judi Clark
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Green
EXTRAS:	Spoiler Q & A (for after reading the book)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: An Abundance of Katherines

Bibliography:

• Looking for Alaska (2005)
• An Abundance of Katherines (2006)
• Paper Towns (2008)
• Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2011) (with David Levithan)
• The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

“It is possible that we are fatally conjoined to this ancient illness, forced to play its cat-and-mouse game for the foreseeable future of our species.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy  (NOV 25, 2010)

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s monumental The Emperor of All Maladies meticulously outlines the trajectory of cancer (derived from the Greek word “karkinos,” meaning crab) over thousands of years, starting in ancient Egypt. In 2010, seven million people around the world will die of cancer. Many have experienced the horrors of this disease through personal experience. The author provides us with a global view of this “shape-shifting entity [that is] imbued with such metaphorical and political potency that it is often described as the definitive plague of our generation.”

In The Emperor of All Maladies, we meet a variety of patients, doctors, scientists, and activists. We also hear the voices of such iconic figures as Susan Sontag, author of Illness as Metaphor, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose Cancer Ward is a desolate and isolating “medical gulag.” Cancer is such a complex subject that it can only be understood by examining it in all of its facets: through myths, the anguish of its victims, and the untiring efforts of its adversaries, both past and present, some of whom were well-meaning but horribly misguided. Mukherjee says in his author’s note that he has made an effort to be “simple but not simplistic.” In this he has succeeded.

Ancient physicians thought that such invisible forces as “miasmas” and “bad humors” caused cancers. Many years of experimentation, studies of human anatomy, laboratory work, and clinical trials have shown cancer to be a “pathology of excess” that originates from the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. Cancer is “unleashed by mutations–changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth.” What treatment to use–surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or a combination of these approaches–is rarely an easy decision. Equally significant are the efforts of public health officials, who seek to reduce cancer’s mortality through early detection (mammography and colonoscopy, among others, are screening methods in use today). In addition, cancer may be prevented by encouraging people to avoid environmental carcinogens such as cigarette smoke.

This elegant and heartrending narrative is far more than a biography of a terrible malady. It is also a story of paternalism, arrogance, and false hope, as well as inventiveness, determination, and inspiration. We meet Sidney Farber, who pioneered a chemotherapeutic approach to leukemia in children during the 1940’s and helped launch “the Jimmy Fund;” William Halstead who, in the nineteenth century, disfigured women with radical mastectomies that, in many cases, were not curative; Paul Ehrlich, who discovered a “magic bullet” to combat syphilis from a derivative of chemical dyes; Mary Lasker, a powerful businesswoman and socialite who zealously raised money and political awareness in what would become a national war on cancer; and George Papanicolaou, a Greek cytologist, whose Pap smear “changed the spectrum of cervical cancer.” Mukherjee constantly moves back and forth in time, showing how the past and the present are closely interconnected.

Throughout the book, Dr. Mukherjee’s keeps returning to one of his patients, thirty-six year old Carla Long. In 2004, she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells. Carla would have a long road ahead of her, one filled with pain, fear, and uncertainty. We look to the future with cautious optimism that even greater progress will be made in our never-ending battle against a treacherous and multi-pronged enemy. Mukherjee is a brilliant oncologist, gifted writer, scrupulous researcher, and spellbinding storyteller. The Emperor of All Maladies is a riveting, thought-provoking, and enlightening work that deserves to become an instant classic.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 146 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (November 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Siddhartha Mukherjee Blog
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More “doctor” books: How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman Better by Atul Gwande

Bibliography:

• The Emperor of All Maladies (November 2010)