Can't Find Any Fault... in Our Stars

Hater gonna hate and I wanted to be a hater.  I wanted to leave the movie theater disappointed, ripped off and passionately hating Hollywood for ruining a good book.  I wanted to list the things that they left out and snark on the things they added in.  I wanted to lament character choices and bemoan the dialogue that they omitted.  I did not get a chance to do any of these things because they did a great job turning a beautiful book into an equally beautiful movie when they made The Fault in Our Stars. 

Sigh.

If you haven’t read a Fault in Our Stars by John Green, do it now.  (Quick synopsis: kids, cancer, love and more) There will be a long line up for it at the library because every teen girl and her mother and maybe even a dad or two are reading it.  After you have read it in two days, max, because you couldn’t put it down, devour the rest of John Green’s writings.  The man remembers what it is like to be a teenager and he makes you remember it as well.  I wish John Green wrote back when I was a teenager because he writes from a male perspective that would have been very useful in trying to figure out boys back then.  Judy Blume was great for telling us what we were thinking while we waited for our periods, but I am struggling to remember a book of hers with a boy as the main character.  Wait!  There was one; I think his name was Tony?  Anyway, John Green gets it.  He remembers the angst, the passion, the nobility crowded into the mind of teenager who can’t even drive himself around yet.  The parents take a secondary role in his books and friends are the ultimate to these teens because really, that is how it is in real life as well.  Read him.  You will love him or at least like him and you will find yourself a little nostalgic and a little encouraged at the same time.  Parental warning:  his teens are not perfect.  They drink, they smoke, they swear, they make out, have S-E-X, and they make bad choices, therefore acting like real teenagers.

I read The Fault in Our Stars back in the fall.  Girls at school were telling me “Ms McMahon you HAVE to read this!”  They quoted from it and held their hearts and I thought alright, alright.  I read it in two days (max) and poor Bill came in right when I finished it and he held me as I cried the front of his shirt wet.  Wet.  I had a book hangover for days because I couldn’t get these characters out of my mind.  I recommended this book to everyone who asked for a good book and then slowly I moved onto other books and let its magic hold on me diminish.  That is, until the trailers for the movie started playing.  Sigh.  I was now determined to have SG read it so we could go to the movies.  She used to be the most voracious reader but has moved onto anime (what?!) and manga (why?!?).  Ew.  I wanted to break into her little world of big eyed characters and have her read about big hearted characters instead.  She refused, so I read it aloud to her, and Bill.  And to the boy when he listened, which was not often because it was too much for him.  It was not the easiest book to read out loud.  There were big words I struggled over which made them laugh and there were scenes I wanted to skip over because it made me embarrassed to read them to my 12 year old.   But I took a deep breath and plowed on and she had the decency to not look right at me while I read them.  It is also very hard to read through your tears; really dragged those last five chapters out.  I knew what was coming but sobbed again.  SG sobbed an entire couch pillow wet.  Um and Bill cried too because he is a good man with a soft heart. But she hugged me, hard, when we were done as we laughed and cried and she went to bed exhausted and she thanked me for reading it to her. 

We were hesitant about the movie.  We learned early on (The Tale of Despereaux) that the books are always better than the movie, always.  We had recently been disappointed with the film adaptation of Divergent, so we went in cautiously.  We were blown away.  Within fifteen minutes, I stopped looking for and caring about any difference that the movie had made to the book.  I didn’t care that Augustus Waters in the book had blue eyes but this Gus had brown.  He was Gus.  They used dialogue straight from the book.  They had my favorite line of the whole book about robot eyes in there.  They portrayed the relationships throughout the book seamlessly on the screen as well.  They captured youth and hope and love so perfectly.  As an audience, we laughed, we tensed up and then, we cried.  Oh my gosh we cried!  SG cried a cup holder full of tissues and then more.  I cried early on, you know what is coming but you can’t brace yourself enough to stop the tears from falling.  We wept until we were raw and empty. As I listened to SG cry her heart out, I felt like a good/bad mom.  Good that she can empathize and become invested in these things, bad for exposing her to it.  At twelve, she hasn’t had her heart broken but now she knows exactly what it feels like.  “Mom my heart is broken!” she wailed as we drove home.  Agreed, I thought. Mine felt a little achey too. She went to bed exhausted and I can only hope this all translates into her reading books with chapters again.

So read the book.  Then see the movie.  You will not be disappointed.  You will be raw and empty, but not disappointed.  You may cry your eyes dry, but you will not be disappointed.  Take it from a hater who wanted to hate, you will love it.