The Fault in Our Stars: A Review

In John Green’s romantic novel, The Fault in Our Stars, Hazel Grace Lancaster, a

stage IV thyroid cancer patient, falls in love with supposedly “cancer-ridden” Augustus

Waters. While the love tale is thoughtful and intriguing, I found myself predicting the

ending of the novel on page 23 of 313, finding that the predictability of the plot was an

immensely upsetting aspect of the novel and a disappointment that largely differentiates

this novel from John Green’s others. However, Green’s superior writing style still scored

high with me, resulting in my rating of a 6 out of 10, the loss of four points being a direct

result of the predictability of this novel. While confronting others who have read this

novel as well, they would often present to me the argument of predictability versus

foreshadow, and the very fine line between them. My rebuttal usually stays along these

lines: Augustus Waters, the stereotypical “hot boy”, as Hazel Grace describes him, comes

to his friend Isaac’s support group (the one that Hazel just so happens to attend), claims

to be free of cancer (and it very much appears that way), but admission into the group is

only granted to those with traces of evident cancer. That is my first argument, which is

much weaker than its successor. My next argument comes on age 23, when Augustus

and Hazel are discussing the invention of cars that make driving for people with

prosthetic legs easier (as Augustus has a prosthetic), he finds hope, sighing, “Maybe

someday”, which prompts Hazel to say to the reader that he “sighed in a way that made

me wonder whether he was confident about the existence of someday.” This text would

have been completely irrelevant had it not been for the ending of the novel (spoiler alert)

of Gus dying of cancer. However, what the novel lacks in stability of plot twists is made

up for in the irony of the ending, that being how Hazel Grace, the character