....And Then The Fandoms Came

The Fault in Our Stars was, and I'm honestly not trying to make a pun here, okay. While I did have some problems with it, it didn't overwhelm, make me sad, "give me feels", or even really make me fall in love with Hazel and Augustus' love. While there were a few lines of writing I did genuinely like, either because I just liked it (or much worse, I heard the movie version replay in my head from the clips I saw). For most part, it was an all-around "meh" for me.

I just didn't see Hazel and Gus fall in love. I'm not going to say "Oh, they were teenagers. That's why I didn't believe it". No, no, that's not it at all. I didn't see them fall in love. Literally. Hazel went from not knowing how she felt about Gus to falling/being in love almost, if not literally, overnight. And even if use, "Oh, well, she just realized she's in love". It shouldn't produce that undying, inseparable feeling I don't think. While there would be attachment, I still feel like there should've been trepidation. Heck, I even would've accepted all of this if a time-skip occurred. That just wasn't there. And I can't even explain Augustus.

I do, as some people have pointed out, some similarities to Twilight in this. Whether that was intentional or not, I have no idea. This has the theme of "girl who has no hope, future, known love, etc. meets boy and boy changes all of that in a few pages of them meeting, girl does everything for boy, including dropping everything" much like The Twilight Saga did. This was just much more literary driven.

Speaking of which, all of the literature references in this made this book hard to understand at some places. Points about life, death, existence, making an impact, just went over my head would just spill out this huge amount of just literature speech. And honestly, I have no problem with literature speech. I love literature speech. I even do it on occasion. However, in the cases that I liked it in books, speech jump from "normal/regular speech" to "literature/quotable speech" wasn't huge. There were times that both Hazel and Gus sounded like teenagers then that would fall away completely for a thought or speech that matched them I suppose in the point it was trying to make but not in the way it was delivered. If that makes sense. You can be powerful or make powerful statement without overdoing the big words, or even being completely simple. There were times I had to put this book down due some of the speeches. 

I pointed some my earlier issues with the book earlier. Like the sexism and Augustus (i.e., saying he wouldn't stay away from Hazel and etc.).

Again, it didn't "wow" me. I had a tough rating this. I'm going between 3 - 3.5 stars really.