The Fault in Our Stars
John Green, 2012
★ 4.12 from 5.9m ratings on Goodreads
A witty, dying teenager meets a boy who refuses to be solemn, and together they argue with oblivion, love, and the author of an unfinished book. A bright, funny voice carries heavy grief at a quick pace, swinging between jokes and longing without warning.
Feels like grief, humor and longing. About love, death and identity.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy sharp teenage banter mixed with romance and open talk about dying. Some readers find the sadness forced and the dialogue too clever to sound real.
Why read it
It gives you a funny, aching look at how love and humor can sit beside grief, and it asks big questions without easy comfort.
A page from the book
What it sounds like to look straight at oblivion without flinching.
“There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. What readers say
Readers say it made them cry and laugh, often in the same reading, and many loved the romance and characters. Others found the sadness forced, the dialogue unrealistic, or the experience boring, so reactions split between deeply moved and disappointed.
John Green.Before writing, John Green worked as a student chaplain at a children's hospital; he has said the experience shaped his wish to write honestly about ill teenagers.
Books that feel like this
The Help
Kathryn Stockett, 2009
Three women in 1960s Mississippi quietly collect the stories white families never expected to be told.
More by John Green
Looking for Alaska
John Green, 2005
A boy leaves Florida for an Alabama boarding school and falls in with a girl who makes every rule feel like a question worth breaking.
Paper Towns
John Green, 2008
A boy who has loved the girl next door from afar gets one wild night with her—and then she vanishes, leaving clues meant for him.
Turtles All the Way Down
John Green, 2017
An observant voice dissect's the anxiety of modern youth, navigating the disconnect between internal obsession and external performance.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Fault in Our Stars for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy sharp teenage banter mixed with romance and open talk about dying. Some readers find the sadness forced and the dialogue too clever to sound real.
- What is The Fault in Our Stars like?
- A bright, funny voice carries heavy grief at a quick pace, swinging between jokes and longing without warning. Feels like grief, humor and longing. About love, death and identity.
- What should I read after The Fault in Our Stars?
- If you liked The Fault in Our Stars, try Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky) and The Help (Kathryn Stockett).
A taste of the feed
A man reframes his self-interest as an act of atonement.
Having now a good house and a very sufficient income, he intended to marry; and in seeking a reconciliation with the Longbourn family he had a wife in view, as he meant to choose one of the daughters, if he found them as handsome and amiable as they were represented by common report. This was his plan of amends—of atonement—for inheriting their father’s estate; and he thought it an excellent one, full of eligibility and suitableness, and excessively generous and disinterested on his own part.
Pride and Prejudice · Jane Austen
The difference between being someone's crush and being seen.
It’s just that I don’t want to be somebody’s crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don’t want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too. I want them to be able to do whatever they want around me. And if they do something I don’t like, I’ll tell them.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower · Stephen Chbosky
The childhood warnings you still half believe, and the ones you ignore.
Two days later, I sit in my parent’s kitchen, waiting for dusk to fall. Igive in and light another cigarette even though last night the surgeongeneral came on the television set and shook his finger at everybody,trying to convince us that smoking will kill us. But Mother once toldme tongue kissing would turn me blind and I’m starting to think it’sall just a big plot between the surgeon general and Mother to make sureno one ever has any fun.
The Help · Kathryn Stockett
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