“John Green's knack for creating smart, funny characters puts his books at the top if my must-read pile, but if I'm going to be honest, The Fault in Our Stars didn't make me swoon. The melodramatic romance between Hazel and Augustus, two teenage cancer patients, read like a Love Story for the new millennium, with "Okay," their oft-repeated term of endearment, being the "Love means never having to say you're sorry" for the Twitter generation.
As usual, Green's dialogue and wordplay are clever, and his descriptions of Amsterdam convinced me to add the city to the travel section of my bucket list. But the doomed romance, replete with scenes in hospital rooms and churches, could have been written for a soap opera. With soaps nearly extinct, teen readers may find The Fault in Our Stars heartbreaking and original, but anyone who witnessed the wedding of Luke and Laura has seen it all before ... just not with the ghost of Anne Frank making a guest appearance to pile on the poignancy.
And here's a desperate plea to all writers of young adult fiction: Enough with the Chuck Taylors already; find another product placement to indicate that your heroine is a smart, funky hipster.”
