He also wants us to remember that she is a sexual being, capable of desire and, also, repulsion. John Green never lets us forget that Hazel has cancer, that she can’t breathe very well, that her face is puffy from her medication. What follows is part crime novel, part coming-of-age narrative, with dashes of magical realism and legalese.īoth novels are wonderfully corporeal. The crime so traumatizes his mother that she will not speak about her attacker, and Joe-the son of a tribal court judge, and himself a future lawyer-decides to find the culprit on his own. Joe, our narrator, is a grown man looking back on his thirteenth year, in 1988, when his mother was beaten and raped on their Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. The Round House is also about a teenager. I won’t tell you what happens after that, except to say that many people have cried through the last third. Next, they both become obsessed with Hazel’s favorite novel, An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten, and travel to Amsterdam to meet him. He’s initially drawn to Hazel because she looks like his dead girlfriend, but he falls for her because she’s so damn cool and smart. When she was 14, an experimental drug called Phalanxifor slowed the growth of the cancer, which has not cured her, only bought her “a bit of purchased time.” At a support group her mother makes her attend, Hazel meets Augustus Waters, who is tall and handsome and devastatingly witty though he lost his right leg to osteosarcoma, a kind of bone cancer, he is now in remission. Hazel, the whip-smart and wry 16-year-old narrator of The Fault in Our Stars, has to drag around an oxygen tank wherever she goes because her “lungs suck at being lungs.” Three years earlier, Hazel was diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer, and the tumors spread to her lungs.
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