The Fault in Our Stars

   I read The Fault in Our Stars. I did it in about 25.2 hours. I did it because Jessie refused to stop raving about it, and I wanted to read it before the movie came out, and I didn't have a book to read during 8th hour, and Shannon had it in her locker.
  You can ask my mom just how quickly and deeply emotionally attached I became. 96 pages in I was venting to her about Augustus and Hazel Grace and hamartias and injustice. The further in to the book I got the harder it was to read, but it was also harder to put down. Eventually, I had to stop reading every few I chapters to catch my emotions and put them back where they belong, before they went on a rampage.
   I finished The Fault in Our Stars outside on my trampoline. It was one of those oh-Missouri-wants-to-actually-be-kind-to-us-and-not-make-it-64-degrees-instead-of-snowing days. I read the last sentence, and I actually didn't cry (which is kinda weird). I was just overwhelmed. I kinda just lay there, drowning in my own emotion.
   So I've been trying to figure out what it is about this book that makes us love it so much, what it is that makes it so devastatingly beautiful. I think I have an idea. You see, technically, The Fault in Our Stars is a book about cancer. But we forget that. Way deep down, in the places that matter, TFiOS is a book about living.
   How is it that two kids with cancer managed to live more than the rest of us even tried to? How is it that John Green managed to perfectly stitch together such opposites as life and death? How is it that we spend all our time trying to understand our existence, instead of making the most of it?
   So I think I've figured out what it is about this book that makes us love it so much, what makes it so devastatingly beautiful: It's the dying that breaks our hearts. And it's the living that puts them back together.