The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I still am not sure how I made it through this achingly funny, poignant book without sobbing. Maybe because most of it really is humorous, even the tragic parts. Dark humor sometimes, true, but witty.

Hazel Grace Lancaster is sixteen years old and slowly dying of cancer when she meets the love of her life, Augustus Waters (age 17), at a Cancer Support Group. Gus had lost a leg in his own battle with cancer a year and a half earlier but comes to the support group that night because of his friend Isaac who is about to lose his remaining eye to cancer surgery.

It sounds like this would be a total downer of a book, but John Green refuses to let that happen. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

For readers' advisors: character doorway primarily, story & language secondary, and there is one not-at-all-explicit sex scene.


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An Abundance of Katherines

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Any book that makes my husband pick it up out of curiosity and laugh out loud while reading the first few pages is great book. How often can you say that about a YA novel?

I loved this book. It took me a while to get past the overuse of the word "fug," although I appreciate why Green used it as he did. But other than that, I found the book great fun. I loved the use of humorous footnotes. I loved how real the characters seemed. I loved the quirkiness of the characters and the use of math to try and describe human relationships. And I thought the structure of the book was interesting, the way John Green interspersed the present-day with (not-chronological) snippets of the "beginning of the end," the "end of the middle," the "middle of the middle," and so on to tell the back-story. That helped hold my interest.

The premise of the story is that uber-smart Colin Singleton has dated and been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine. He's totally depressed and decides to go on a road trip with his hilarious friend Hassan, who is trying to avoid going to college & getting a job. They end up in rural Tennessee, drawn by the lure of a tourist trap and caught by the offer of a summer job and a place to stay. Colin is obsessed with creating his Theorem: a mathematical formula to predict who will dump whom and when in a relationship. Question is, can math actually predict the future?

For readers' advisors: character & story doorways.



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