Book Analysis: The Fault In Our Stars

In our everyday lives we face constant challenges, some experience more than others. In the novel The Fault in our Stars by John Green, a young highschool girl Hazel has cancer. She faces her everyday teenage challenges as she fighting cancer. To get through each day she uses different coping skills to make her days a little bit easier. Hazel is a sixteen year old girl who was diagnosed with Stage 4 Thyroid cancer as a little girl. Her whole life had been shifted and turned upside down by her cancer. She had to leave high school, get her GED and start college early. Hazel had to leave all of her friends and adjust to a completely new life. Having a normal life was really not going to happen but her mother tried as hard as she could to give

She knows that when someone has cancer, people look at them like they are a foreign being. She does not want to be seen like that. She wants to be seen as a normal teenage girl. She has a friend from highschool that she sees once in a blue moon but feels the tension every time they get together. She knows that things will never feel the same with her. When Hazel meets Augustus, a boy she met at a Cancer support group, she feels like a normal teenager. They both have cancer but act very nonchalant about it. They both live their everyday lives like it is a normal day. Hazel has a very realistic attitude. She doesn’t like when people tiptoe around the fact she has cancer but also doesn’t like it to be the topic of conversation. This helps her cope a lot. Her dry sense of humor is a huge part of her coping. That is why Augustus is such a great fit in Hazel’s life. They are both very similar in that way. Augustus once said “I love it when you talk medical to me.” (TFIOS pp. 34). To the both of them, cancer has become a normality in their lives. A great part to the way Hazel copes is that she does not care what anyone says or thinks. She does what she likes/wants. She does not care what everyone else is doing. If she did, that would just be an added, unneeded stressor in her life. Hazel also loves to read, and she uses reading as a way of coping. She constantly rereads the book “An Imperial Affliction”. Hazel says it was the closest thing she had to a bible (TFIOS pp.13). Hazel relates this book to her own life. In a way it makes her feel as if she is not alone. She mentions that the author of that book, Peter Van Houten, was the only person she had ever come across who seemed to understand what is was like to be dying but to not have died (TFIOS pp. 13). This is what she uses as a distraction. Reading kind of takes her away from the life she is living and puts her in another role. Hazel also sees cancer