Despite our current circumstances, Princess Child and I have both just read The Fault in Our Stars, ’cause it’s important to ALWAYS keep up with popular culture.

This Young Adult Fiction novel tells a humourous, heartbreaking story of first love.  The emotions intensified by the omnipresent fear of death as the two protagonists live with cancer.

John Green delivers an authentic voice for his young characters and captures beautifully the thrilling awkwardness of teenage love.

Hazel is sixteen and has terminal thyroid cancer, a miracle drug buying her a little extra time, she moves through life with her oxygen bottle permanently attached. Augustus is seventeen he’s lost a leg to cancer. The two are older than their years, a side effect of long hospital stays and losing friends on a regular basis.

I found Hazel’s relationship with her mother particularly moving. The mum trying to create normal out of the abnormal, the daughter secretly worried about how her mother will cope with her death while avoiding new attachments because “I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”.

The dark humour of the novel was also appealing “when they tell you that you have, say a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five … so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards”.

The novel gives an insight into the emotion of trying to grow up while living with a life-threatening illness. A young boy is left blind yet it is being dumped by his girlfriend which sends him into despair. Adults disappoint and the desire to leave a mark in the world heightens with a time bomb ticking in your body.

All in all I found The Fault In Our Stars an engaging read deftly weaving the normal adolescent woes with the deeper, more challenging issues of life and death in a cancer filled world.