5 out of 5 stars.

John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars is absolutely riveting. From the very first eloquent sentence I knew it would be a good book, despite the emotional pain.

TFiOS is about a girl named Hazel Grace Lancaster, who has terminal cancer. But thanks to a miracle drug called Phalanxifor, she’s not getting any worse – although she’s not getting better either.

Her mother forces her to go to a group for kids who have or had cancer. It is in “the literal heart of Jesus,” the center of a cross shaped church. Hazel didn’t want to go.  She was perfectly happy sitting at home watching America’s Next Top Model.

But she’s happy she went.

There she meets Augustus “Gus” Waters, who lost his right leg due to osteosarcoma. He’s the first friend that she really liked to hang out with because he knows what she’s going through and she feels like he understands her.

From the beginning of the book Hazel is facinated with her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, by Peter van Houten. Gus reads it and he becomes almost as obsessed as Hazel. Although Hazel has tried several times to contact him, he never answers because he’s reclusive and dislikes people. Gus wants to use his wish from “the Genies,” a play on the Make a Wish Foundation, to fly him and Hazel to Amsterdam to meet van Houten.

In the meantime Hazel has found herself pulling away from Gus. She feels she is bound to explode and leave all her loved ones in pain as soon as she dies, which she knows will happen sooner rather than later. Hazel decides that she doesn’t want to pursue a relationship with Augustus, in the hopes that it will save him the pain he had to go through when his former girlfriend Caroline Mathers died from cancer.

Hazel falls ill from pneumonia and is hospitalized. Gus visits her several times, and Hazel realizes she’s in love with him. Although she and her family had a huge scare from the pneumonia, and she probably shouldn’t do anything strenuous, they schedule a flight to Amsterdam using Gus’s wish.

Their entire adventure had me feeling like I was about to cry, but the end definitely did me in. Hazel and Augustus Waters’ stars were definitely crossed. Shakespeare might have said, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings,” but that is most definitely not the case in TFiOS.

John Green is a positively brilliant author, and the story he crafts in The Fault in Our Stars will have readers clutching their stomachs in laughter and reaching for the tissues to dry their tears.