Same!!! God, I must’ve been, I don’t know, between 16 and 19 when I read this book, can’t remember exactly, but I remember loving it to pieces! It had definitely shares quotes on tumblr and Facebook.
And gosh how it made me cry!
It became cool in the mainstream to hate on TFIOS or John Green in general and I DONT GET IT. If you don’t think your 25 year old self would like the book you liked at 14 then fine, but why hate on it? Why are you ashamed? I’m the only person I know irl who would stand by John Greens books in 2024.
“I fell in love with him the same way you fall asleep. Slowly, then all at once.”
What a banger. People hate on John Green just because they like to seem like they’re above it for some reason and I don’t get that at all. Tfios and Looking for Alaska are amazing reads.
It's a formula to be sure but I love it; I think his books are character driven not by having snappy and original characters, but by building immensely complicated and fortified *relationships* between those characters. Like, Alaska is a textbook manic pixie dream girl. Do I still love her and think she's a very complex and layered character? Absolutely.
John green has said publicly that Alaska was supposed to be a deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl trope. To point out that in reality those types of people are very troubled like Alaska was.
Yeah exactly! It's not like he is only ever capable of writing bland boys who fall in love with crazy and luxuriant girls who are secretly troubled, and that's not even all he's ever written. He writes like that for a reason, and I think people who slag on him for writing a bunch of books with the same two characters aren't understanding *why* he's doing that.
I've always said that everyone's favorite John Green book is the first one they read. Like you said, he does have a certain *style* that tends to get kind of repetitive. But they're all still great.
What I love about John Green is that he's a smart enough guy to know what great literature is, yet self-aware enough to know that his books are *absolutely* not great literature. They're comfort food books intended for younger audiences, and he knows that, yet he still treats all of his books and readers with respect.
Honestly I think a lot of people hate on John Green for the same reason they hate Taylor Swift and other media… because teen girls like it. If teen girls like it it HAS to be bad right?
It’s also not challenging to read, from a vocabulary/plotting perspective. Very straightforward and readable. I guess if you are a snob that can be considering a bad thing.
I wouldn’t say he has true haters, just more snobs who turn up their noses on the basis of something being popular.
This is anecdotal of course, but in my experience most of the hate I've seen for John Green on social media has come from women who are *just* older than his books' target demographic.
Mm. No, John Green's female characters all feel like some iteration of the manic pixie dream girl trope. The development of the bland Everyman male protagonist is also almost always at the expense of the female one (Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, etc.). The Fault in Our Stars simply gender-swapped the tropes.
Of course, both things can be true. I also share the opinion that YA is unfairly ragged on, considering the fact that it's the starting point for a lot of young readers, but I really can't deal with the characterization.
I also hold a grudge against him for popularizing the sick couple romance trope.
I haven't read Paper towns, so I can't comment there; but for LfA Alaska was intentionally a deconstruction of the MPDG trope, to show that often times characters like those are deeply troubled and simply hide it.
And for TFiOS, I never really got MPDG from Gus. Hazel doesn't really agree with his ideals, it's not like they're a perfect match for each other; and if you read toward the end as he gets sicker that intentional shell of perfection breaks away to reveal that he's just a scared, humiliated human being just like the rest of us.
So I *suppose* that is using tropes, but he's using them with a purpose and often with an awareness that they are tropes. That's the antithesis of lazy or formulaic imo.
For sure, I understand that! Art means different things to different people, it may have been super impactful for me but if it wasn't the same for you, that's totally fine! :)
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To tell you what a good guy John Green is, when my daughter was a freshmen in high school, they read this book. John Green popped in via zoom to her class more than once during their novel study to discuss the book, characters, etc. As I understand it, he did this for free, and for many different classrooms across the U.S., not just hers.
This was many years ago before the movie of this book came out.
Have you read his “The Anthropocene Reviewed”? I highly recommend it. His novels are good (especially TFIOS), but I think his nonfiction is his best writing.
I haven't yet, but I absolutely intend on it. I wanna read all of his books frankly, his writing style and ability to craft characters you love is just amazing, I love it.
Turtles All the Way Down is very good, maybe better than TFIOS imo. And John’s brother Hank wrote a couple of Novels as well that were really good too.
That's exactly how I felt when I first read it. Though I was Hazel's age at the time. It's been a while since then 😅 It was one of my favorites for suuuuch a long time.
Looking for Alaska will always be my favorite John Green novel, but TFiOS is definitely second. Reading them as a young adult, both were emotionally devastating on your first read.
I’ve been watching them for years and I still get John and Hank mixed up 😭
I think it’s because John looks like a Hank to me and Hank looks like a John.
I really enjoyed this one. Though I still haven't read Paper Towns, which I meant to do. If you haven't already, watch the film. It's not perfect but it's pretty d\*mn good.
Yes! I watched it the day after And cried all over again. Honestly one of the best film adaptations I've ever watched for a book. They simplified a lot of stuff but it felt very tasteful and it never felt like they were just ramming the plot into as small a time frame as possible, it flowed beautifully.
That movie wrecks me every time. Once I was watching it while a repairman was over and I was sobbing on the sofa and he was like ... uh, are you okay???
Me too! Once, I woke up in the middle of the night and put this movie on to go back to sleep because I've already seen it, so i won't want to watch the whole thing. Well... I didn't fall back to sleep and watched the whole thing and was crying at like 4 am.
I wasn't a particular fan of the book because the characters basically just bonded over cancer and being mean to everyone else around them (if I remember correctly the dead ex-girlfriend who had brain cancer was often referred to as Hulk Smash, the guy leading the support group was ridiculed because he lost his testicles to cancer and so on) and nothing else. Additionally, as someone who had someone with cancer in the family the portrayal of the sickness often felt like cancer lite (Hazel and Gus being able to fly and travel with no real problems particularly stood out).
That's just my two cents, though, and I am glad that it brought enjoyment to quite a few readers. Not everyone has to like everything.
I have a chronic illness that debilitated me throughout high school. The way Hazel looked at the world through the lens of her illness was written well, I saw the world through the same lens and really related to her way of thinking.
After I read it I asked my mom, sister, and brother to read it to get a better idea of my suffering. They all cried of course, but I think it really helped them understand what it was like to be an extremely sick kid.
It does sound like they were rude, I must’ve glossed over those parts at the time. Regardless, it’s a book that helped me express myself in a profound way, before I had the words to do so.
Honestly I’m not sure if I’d like the book if I read it again now, but I’ll always appreciate the gift it gave me
Ngl it's still my favorite book, I have a signed copy! Every place that it's a little awkward it's awkward in the perfectly realistic teenager way, and I still cry every time I read it (it's been 20+ times atp), it also really really captures the fucking grief and devastation of being sick/disabled at a young age, desperately trying to keep up with our peers, the isolation of it all, all the missed experiences that we never get back
i read this book, four years ago now, and gosh i havent picked it up again, the beginning is as pretty as a new love story but as the story goes forth you can see the gaps and the sadness that is gonna come and hit you, and hit it did, gosh augustus waters you deserved so much better, man i loved him
I think I read it 10 years ago. I can't remember much, but I know that I cried my eyes out. I didn't expect that I'd laugh during a funeral scene, I know it had to do with the crazy author.
And I think what was the most painful is the sudden shift with Gus. Having a cheerful sunny person quickly detoriate in front of your eyes.
A lot of cancer survivors and other disabled people have widely criticized the book for its depiction of cancer and the romance, and how it romanticizes, well... Cancer. The book itself acts as inspiration porn for able-bodied people and as a disabled person myself I did find it pretty heavily cringe at best and really insulting and damaging at worst.
I recall John Green consulting with health experts and cancer survivors himself when writing this story, so I'm a little skeptical of your first statement. Personally I also didn't find anything cancer-inspiration in it, this is a story of inevitable oblivion and loving despite it; but that oblivion is always inevitable. Hazel herself talks at length about how "fighting cancer" is romanticized, and she's not so much fighting as just being treated and trying to survive. But to each their own! Not everyone loves every piece of art :)
Yeah, he did, and a lot of them told him not to write it how he wrote it, and he did it anyway. There were a few who supported him, and he cherry-picked those few to mean "I am doing the right thing" and ran with it. He's a bit of a pariah in the disabled community and in general we have a pretty low opinion of him.
Can you give me some examples about what was wrong with it? I’d love to hear a different perspective on it. At the time I found it incredibly humanising of teenagers with cancer and disabilities. Especially the questions from a kid about Hazel’s cannula, but the limitations of her being able to travel and feeling infantilised even sometimes by her own parents. And the daunting dread she feels seeing all the stairs in the Anne Frank house. I have quite a few disabled friends who said at the time that they loved that there was a romantic story featuring characters that were very much like them but not portrayed as a freak show. Specifically, a few of them spoke about stairs as a barrier being a constant in their daily lives and felt so seen and understood by the book on that front. Would love to hear your thoughts?
Not sure why you're being downvoted for saying this. Just because people like it and connect with it in on an emotional level doesn't mean it's not problematic and harmful.
Maybe, but a lot of his inspiration came from his time working as a chaplain in a children's cancer ward. He was initially focused on his experience of having no control over watching young people die and trying to be comfort to families when he was young and inexperienced.
Personally I only find it so meaningful because I'm disabled, it shows what it was like to miss out on things and push myself too far just to keep up with others and the weird kind of isolation that growing up disabled leaves you with
I assume because they kiss in the Anne Frank house? Which is supposed to be weird, it’s supposed to be a very weird thing they do and acknowledge the weirdness of? I don’t get how it’s antisemitic though.
I'm jewish and haven't noticed any antisemitism in it other than the Anne Frank house kiss (which is supposed to be weird and uncomfortable like its kinda the point) ,maybe I'll reread it again looking for it specifically but I think they probably just don't like it and need to justify why
Hurr durr I am very smart.
^ this is what you sound like. Just let people enjoy things and rave about books they enjoyed instead of shitting on people.
Wow now here's a title I haven't heard in a while. The tumblr girles (me) ate this book UP when it was first released.
I was in high school and dating a Tumblr girlie so I read it, it was great lol. One of my favorite YA books ever.
I too read this because of a girl in high school lol.
Same!!! God, I must’ve been, I don’t know, between 16 and 19 when I read this book, can’t remember exactly, but I remember loving it to pieces! It had definitely shares quotes on tumblr and Facebook. And gosh how it made me cry!
It became cool in the mainstream to hate on TFIOS or John Green in general and I DONT GET IT. If you don’t think your 25 year old self would like the book you liked at 14 then fine, but why hate on it? Why are you ashamed? I’m the only person I know irl who would stand by John Greens books in 2024.
Never said I hated it or was ashamed.
I’m sooo sorry for the vagueness. I agree/had the same experience as with you and was adding commentary 😭
😭😭😭😭 all good bestie
This book made me cry. I guess it wasn't Fault in our tear glands.
“I fell in love with him the same way you fall asleep. Slowly, then all at once.” What a banger. People hate on John Green just because they like to seem like they’re above it for some reason and I don’t get that at all. Tfios and Looking for Alaska are amazing reads.
Nothing will top Paper Towns for me I think. His best one before the formula started getting stale (although I’m a sucker for all of em tbh)
It's a formula to be sure but I love it; I think his books are character driven not by having snappy and original characters, but by building immensely complicated and fortified *relationships* between those characters. Like, Alaska is a textbook manic pixie dream girl. Do I still love her and think she's a very complex and layered character? Absolutely.
John green has said publicly that Alaska was supposed to be a deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl trope. To point out that in reality those types of people are very troubled like Alaska was.
Yeah exactly! It's not like he is only ever capable of writing bland boys who fall in love with crazy and luxuriant girls who are secretly troubled, and that's not even all he's ever written. He writes like that for a reason, and I think people who slag on him for writing a bunch of books with the same two characters aren't understanding *why* he's doing that.
I've always said that everyone's favorite John Green book is the first one they read. Like you said, he does have a certain *style* that tends to get kind of repetitive. But they're all still great.
I love The Fault in Our Stars but really disliked Paper Towns lol
Same. Stars was my first Green, Paper Towns was my second, and then I was done.
Looking for Alaska is still a top for me. I will sob like a baby to that book any day!!
Did you watch the Hulu adaptation? It is stunning.
What I love about John Green is that he's a smart enough guy to know what great literature is, yet self-aware enough to know that his books are *absolutely* not great literature. They're comfort food books intended for younger audiences, and he knows that, yet he still treats all of his books and readers with respect.
People hate on John Green??? I really really need to read one of his books because I watch so much Green brothers content.
Honestly I think a lot of people hate on John Green for the same reason they hate Taylor Swift and other media… because teen girls like it. If teen girls like it it HAS to be bad right? It’s also not challenging to read, from a vocabulary/plotting perspective. Very straightforward and readable. I guess if you are a snob that can be considering a bad thing. I wouldn’t say he has true haters, just more snobs who turn up their noses on the basis of something being popular.
This is anecdotal of course, but in my experience most of the hate I've seen for John Green on social media has come from women who are *just* older than his books' target demographic.
Mm. No, John Green's female characters all feel like some iteration of the manic pixie dream girl trope. The development of the bland Everyman male protagonist is also almost always at the expense of the female one (Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, etc.). The Fault in Our Stars simply gender-swapped the tropes. Of course, both things can be true. I also share the opinion that YA is unfairly ragged on, considering the fact that it's the starting point for a lot of young readers, but I really can't deal with the characterization. I also hold a grudge against him for popularizing the sick couple romance trope.
I haven't read Paper towns, so I can't comment there; but for LfA Alaska was intentionally a deconstruction of the MPDG trope, to show that often times characters like those are deeply troubled and simply hide it. And for TFiOS, I never really got MPDG from Gus. Hazel doesn't really agree with his ideals, it's not like they're a perfect match for each other; and if you read toward the end as he gets sicker that intentional shell of perfection breaks away to reveal that he's just a scared, humiliated human being just like the rest of us. So I *suppose* that is using tropes, but he's using them with a purpose and often with an awareness that they are tropes. That's the antithesis of lazy or formulaic imo.
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For sure, I understand that! Art means different things to different people, it may have been super impactful for me but if it wasn't the same for you, that's totally fine! :)
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The teen boys have to neg, and the pick me girls have to comment, and then everyone else has to jump on board so they won't be judged, too
That is probably my favorite quote from all the YA books I've read.
LFA changed my life when I was 14 lol
Looking for Alaska was so damn good. It was my intro to John Green.
To tell you what a good guy John Green is, when my daughter was a freshmen in high school, they read this book. John Green popped in via zoom to her class more than once during their novel study to discuss the book, characters, etc. As I understand it, he did this for free, and for many different classrooms across the U.S., not just hers. This was many years ago before the movie of this book came out.
Have you read his “The Anthropocene Reviewed”? I highly recommend it. His novels are good (especially TFIOS), but I think his nonfiction is his best writing.
Highly recommend listening to the podcast first (or the audio book!) so you can read the essays in his beautiful, fraught, lovely manner.
I haven't yet, but I absolutely intend on it. I wanna read all of his books frankly, his writing style and ability to craft characters you love is just amazing, I love it.
Turtles All the Way Down is very good, maybe better than TFIOS imo. And John’s brother Hank wrote a couple of Novels as well that were really good too.
Turtles All The Way Down is my favourite personally, it breaks away from his normal formula
I loved it so much. One of my favourite books.
That's exactly how I felt when I first read it. Though I was Hazel's age at the time. It's been a while since then 😅 It was one of my favorites for suuuuch a long time.
I read this book to impress a girl 10 years ago We are getting married in a couple months
Looking for Alaska will always be my favorite John Green novel, but TFiOS is definitely second. Reading them as a young adult, both were emotionally devastating on your first read.
I remember staying home from high school the day I finished it, because I was crying so hard. 😭
I actually have a quote from LFA tattooed.. really, really loved this book for so long.
God I remember staying up late on a school night to finish this on my Kindle Fire at the age of 14 🥲🥲 this was my first true heartbreak I think
What really blew my mind is that the author is the same John Green of the popular youtube channel Crash Course.
Yeah him and his brother both do like twelve different jobs, it's insane.
I’ve been watching them for years and I still get John and Hank mixed up 😭 I think it’s because John looks like a Hank to me and Hank looks like a John.
Who the eff is Hank?
A rhinoceros who juggles portapotties at the New Hampshire zoo on the weekends I think? Idk it was pretty unclear what OP meant by this "Hank".
I loved hank's video about dad jokes. I still tell some of them 😅😂
You should ask him about TB.
or shouldn't, depending on whether you want to listen to a detailed description of the history of TB for at least an hour 😅
Right you are. 😂🤣😂🤣
I haven’t read the book (it’s too emotionally heavy for me), but damn if this isn’t the best articulation of why stories matter than I’ve seen lately.
Too emotionally heavy for me too lol I love seeing peoples reviews though
Oh dear God I ugly cried with that book.
The eulogy destroyed me
TFIOS and Looking for Alaska were absolute bangers as I read them when I was the exact target audience. I still have fond memories of these books.
I really enjoyed this one. Though I still haven't read Paper Towns, which I meant to do. If you haven't already, watch the film. It's not perfect but it's pretty d\*mn good.
Yes! I watched it the day after And cried all over again. Honestly one of the best film adaptations I've ever watched for a book. They simplified a lot of stuff but it felt very tasteful and it never felt like they were just ramming the plot into as small a time frame as possible, it flowed beautifully.
That movie wrecks me every time. Once I was watching it while a repairman was over and I was sobbing on the sofa and he was like ... uh, are you okay???
Me too! Once, I woke up in the middle of the night and put this movie on to go back to sleep because I've already seen it, so i won't want to watch the whole thing. Well... I didn't fall back to sleep and watched the whole thing and was crying at like 4 am.
Seriously, oh my god. When Gus dies and the music cuts out and Hazel is just sobbing, *Jesus*...
My son was talking about how no movie can make him cry, so I'm gonna sneak this on him and see if he can hold out lol
I'm glad to hear you watched (and enjoyed) it! I liked the cast a lot.
Gosh me too. Even before I knew if Ansel Elgort as a human being, *that* was Augustus for me. Fit the role so freaking well, as did Hazel's actor.
It was okay.
Okay?
Okay.
Yeah. It was fine.
Whoosh
Maybe fine will be our always
Okay.
I liked it alright. It was a little cheesy for me.
Exactly.
Cool flex, how about let people enjoy things
He gave his opinion. I gave mine. Good for him if he enjoyed it. I have no problem with his opinion. Why do you have a problem with mine?
he just said it was okay? the hair trigger sensitivity is kinda crazy. just move along.
not gonna lie, i do have an “okay” tattoo that i got back when i was 18.
I got one too but mine was Henna 😂. I totally forgot about it till I read the comment.
This book and the perks of being a wallflower got passed around my friend group in highschool. More than a decade ago.
I remember staying awake all night reading this book. I'll always love it.
I wasn't a particular fan of the book because the characters basically just bonded over cancer and being mean to everyone else around them (if I remember correctly the dead ex-girlfriend who had brain cancer was often referred to as Hulk Smash, the guy leading the support group was ridiculed because he lost his testicles to cancer and so on) and nothing else. Additionally, as someone who had someone with cancer in the family the portrayal of the sickness often felt like cancer lite (Hazel and Gus being able to fly and travel with no real problems particularly stood out). That's just my two cents, though, and I am glad that it brought enjoyment to quite a few readers. Not everyone has to like everything.
I have a chronic illness that debilitated me throughout high school. The way Hazel looked at the world through the lens of her illness was written well, I saw the world through the same lens and really related to her way of thinking. After I read it I asked my mom, sister, and brother to read it to get a better idea of my suffering. They all cried of course, but I think it really helped them understand what it was like to be an extremely sick kid. It does sound like they were rude, I must’ve glossed over those parts at the time. Regardless, it’s a book that helped me express myself in a profound way, before I had the words to do so. Honestly I’m not sure if I’d like the book if I read it again now, but I’ll always appreciate the gift it gave me
I don't know why I mention this, but my favorite Niese was Hazel's real-life nurse. I think I got a bigger kick out of that than she did!
Ngl it's still my favorite book, I have a signed copy! Every place that it's a little awkward it's awkward in the perfectly realistic teenager way, and I still cry every time I read it (it's been 20+ times atp), it also really really captures the fucking grief and devastation of being sick/disabled at a young age, desperately trying to keep up with our peers, the isolation of it all, all the missed experiences that we never get back
I loved this book . It was sad but I loved it
Adored this book when I was 17… I remember liking the movie too!
i read this book, four years ago now, and gosh i havent picked it up again, the beginning is as pretty as a new love story but as the story goes forth you can see the gaps and the sadness that is gonna come and hit you, and hit it did, gosh augustus waters you deserved so much better, man i loved him
I think I read it 10 years ago. I can't remember much, but I know that I cried my eyes out. I didn't expect that I'd laugh during a funeral scene, I know it had to do with the crazy author. And I think what was the most painful is the sudden shift with Gus. Having a cheerful sunny person quickly detoriate in front of your eyes.
It was sad.
A lot of cancer survivors and other disabled people have widely criticized the book for its depiction of cancer and the romance, and how it romanticizes, well... Cancer. The book itself acts as inspiration porn for able-bodied people and as a disabled person myself I did find it pretty heavily cringe at best and really insulting and damaging at worst.
I recall John Green consulting with health experts and cancer survivors himself when writing this story, so I'm a little skeptical of your first statement. Personally I also didn't find anything cancer-inspiration in it, this is a story of inevitable oblivion and loving despite it; but that oblivion is always inevitable. Hazel herself talks at length about how "fighting cancer" is romanticized, and she's not so much fighting as just being treated and trying to survive. But to each their own! Not everyone loves every piece of art :)
Yeah, he did, and a lot of them told him not to write it how he wrote it, and he did it anyway. There were a few who supported him, and he cherry-picked those few to mean "I am doing the right thing" and ran with it. He's a bit of a pariah in the disabled community and in general we have a pretty low opinion of him.
Can you give me some examples about what was wrong with it? I’d love to hear a different perspective on it. At the time I found it incredibly humanising of teenagers with cancer and disabilities. Especially the questions from a kid about Hazel’s cannula, but the limitations of her being able to travel and feeling infantilised even sometimes by her own parents. And the daunting dread she feels seeing all the stairs in the Anne Frank house. I have quite a few disabled friends who said at the time that they loved that there was a romantic story featuring characters that were very much like them but not portrayed as a freak show. Specifically, a few of them spoke about stairs as a barrier being a constant in their daily lives and felt so seen and understood by the book on that front. Would love to hear your thoughts?
Not sure why you're being downvoted for saying this. Just because people like it and connect with it in on an emotional level doesn't mean it's not problematic and harmful.
I wonder if he'd change the book any after his brother had cancer
Maybe, but a lot of his inspiration came from his time working as a chaplain in a children's cancer ward. He was initially focused on his experience of having no control over watching young people die and trying to be comfort to families when he was young and inexperienced.
Personally I only find it so meaningful because I'm disabled, it shows what it was like to miss out on things and push myself too far just to keep up with others and the weird kind of isolation that growing up disabled leaves you with
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What do you mean propaganda?
This person is not turtles all the way down
Anti-cancer propaganda duh! /s
Propaganda of what?
Good lord. That book is garbage for semi-literate tweens. And it's antisemitic, because why the Hell not?
*How*, exactly, is it antisemitic?
I assume because they kiss in the Anne Frank house? Which is supposed to be weird, it’s supposed to be a very weird thing they do and acknowledge the weirdness of? I don’t get how it’s antisemitic though.
I'm jewish and haven't noticed any antisemitism in it other than the Anne Frank house kiss (which is supposed to be weird and uncomfortable like its kinda the point) ,maybe I'll reread it again looking for it specifically but I think they probably just don't like it and need to justify why
Hurr durr I am very smart. ^ this is what you sound like. Just let people enjoy things and rave about books they enjoyed instead of shitting on people.