Young Love and Sad Books

I love it when people ask me for a book recommendation, particularly when they’re looking for a good novel. I’ll take on just about any taste, and I love very specific requests; just last week, someone asked me my opinion on a “second date Steinbeck,” that is, the perfect Steinbeck novel to give someone on your second date. Getting paid to talk books is my idea of a dream, and there's nothing better than helping someone discover a title that could become a new favorite. There’s really only one request that makes my heart just sink: “How about something with a happy ending?”

I don’t purposely avoid happy books, but somehow I have read very few novels with endings most people would define as even remotely happy. I suppose might as well go ahead and admit it: I love sad fiction. Several years ago, I stumbled across an article somewhere in the wide wild internet about a study linking sad fiction to empathy. According to this study, people who read books about other people’s suffering become more sympathetic to suffering they encounter in the world (I have googled and googled, and I cannot for the life of me find that study. If I ever do, I will share it here, I promise).  This makes a lot of sense to me, and it gives me something to say when people comment on the kind of dark fiction I always seem to be reading. Now, as a bookseller, I would never put a Wally Lamb novel into the hands of someone seeking a light vacation read. I know better than that (and I would hate it if someone did the opposite to me).  But if I think the person is up for it, I like to throw in a big fat tear-jerker of a novel, one that really immerses you in the struggle of another person and gives you a completely different lens on the world. And that brings me to the book that this entire blog post is really about: The Fault In Our Stars, a new novel by John Green.

You really, really ought to read this book. It is devastatingly sad (the plot centers around two cancer-stricken teenagers who fall in love), but it is also one of the most purely joyful books I’ve read in a long time. It’s also one of the best love stories I've ever encountered. The main character is Hazel, a seventeen-year-old girl who has terminal cancer. An experimental treatment has given her a few years, but her struggling lungs remind her every day that she is on borrowed time. She is, in her own words, a grenade that will inevitably explode, and she is trying to reduce the casualties left in her wake. Enter Augustus, or Gus, a dreamboat of a boy who lost a leg to bone cancer. He is instantly smitten with Hazel, and refuses to let her push him away, no matter how sick either have been or will become. Their attraction is certain and potent. Hazel and Gus are cut from the same cloth, and Green does not waste any time playing coy with their feelings. Hazel and Gus are so meant for each other that it could almost be too perfect, except that for them, nothing is perfect. 

John Green is passionate, articulate, literate and hilarious. In his books he fearlessly tackles the Big Issues, particularly death and mortality, in a way that reminds us why it is so important for those Big Issues to be tackled in the first place.  He has garnered a huge following of readers online who tune into his video blogs, which he and his brother upload to youtube. I highly recommend that you check out his videos – in particular, his response to his Printz prize-winning novel Looking for Alaska being declared pornography by a group of fundamentalist parents. Green’s novels invite young readers to experience literature in a visceral way, and to ask questions that would make their English teachers swoon. He does not talk down to his readers, or to anyone. His characters are also literate, articulate and funny, but never lose the breath of authenticity that makes you feel so instantly connected to them. In this case, his characters are young humans with cancer, who have struggled and loved and lived an awful lot in their short sixteen or seventeen years of life. And there’s a lot we can learn from them.

This book will probably make you cry. That’s okay. It might also make you feel the most human of experiences: falling in love, and the fear that goes along with loving someone who is all too mortal. Fault in Our Stars is one of those books that transcends niches, genre and age – if I had to label the shelf I put it on, I would call it “Books for Humans,” silly as that might sound.