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“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”
Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life.
Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood.
The next choosing is fast approaching, and Agnieszka is afraid. She knows—everyone knows—that the Dragon will take Kasia: beautiful, graceful, brave Kasia, all the things Agnieszka isn’t, and her dearest friend in the world. And there is no way to save her.
But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose.
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To Infinity
Sunday, August 30, 2015
by John Green
I am not an easy audience to appease, I know this. It takes a lot for a book to earn five stars from me, and even John Green is not immune to a little waffling on my part. At times, TFiOS had earned itself a solid three. At others, I had dropped it to a two, then elevated it to a four. Even after I had read it, I set it aside, opened Goodreads and went, "meh, three-point-five."
Then I went to bed that night and cried myself to sleep.
I'm not sure if it was the characters, their situation, or a cosmic combination of the two, but Hazel and Augustus had wrapped their tiny teenage talons around my heart before I realized it was happening, and now I can't get them off of it.
They're an odd couple of kids, Hazel and Augustus. Odd in such a way as I think detracts from the message the book is ultimately trying to convey. I understand why they were designated "teenagers" instead of "adults". It's much easier to make an audience feel desperately sad for two almost-children who are dying than two grown ups who have already had some semblance of a life to look back on. The thing is, Hazel Grace and Augustus aren't teenagers, not in the way they speak, not in the way they act, certainly not in the way they contemplate the deeper meanings behind life, the universe and everything.
I'm not saying teenagers can't be introspective and thoughtful. Absolutely they can, they should! But Hazel and Augustus are so far beyond introspective and thoughtful, they communicate with a depth of understanding of life and language that transcends any amount of experience they could possibly have gleaned from their sixteen or seventeen years on Earth.
For me, this really takes away from the story, because it turns it into a bit of a pandering session. I think the entire plot would have worked wonderfully even if the leads had been well into their thirties or forties. In fact, it might have worked even better, because the reader wouldn't be constantly distracting themselves with thoughts like, "aww, but they're only *children*."
Because cancer isn't only sad when kids get it, it's sad when anyone gets it, and this book isn't about kids with cancer, if you can get past the designated label of "young adult".
That, I am happy to say, is my only issue with this book. Yes, it's a big issue, it's why I almost gave this a three-and-a-half instead of a five, but it's the only one.
The writing style is, as per John Green's usual standards, superb. It's lovely when you can tell that an author has chosen each and every single word he puts on the page with loving care. His sentences *mean* something, his syntax is profoundly important to the overarching plot, not a hair is out of place in the structure or tone of the language itself. I have never fought a terminal illness and I hope I won't have to for a long, long time (yes, that was the sound of me knocking on wood). But after reading TFiOS, I feel as though I have some idea of what it might be like to be that scared, that hopeless, that lonely and that unfinished.
The ultimate question that TFiOS asks us to consider is, "why?" Why do we go through what we do? Is it some twist of fate that planted us where we are, or does the fault lie within us, decided by a choice we made somewhere along the line, however small and seemingly insignificant. Or, does it matter? Aren't we all, in the end, just made up of star stuff? Never really dying, never really ending, just changing, reforming into something else?
I thought about all of this three hours after finishing the book. Three hours after putting it down and deciding it might have been a solid four. Three hours after scoffing at Hazel and Augustus and their pedantic soliloquies spoken like no teenager (or adult, for that matter) that I have ever heard. I decided it doesn't matter, because I cried anyway, I missed them anyway, and I wished for just a little bit more time for both of them.
And then I gave them all the stars I could.
There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does. Augustus Waters, The Fault in Our Stars Labels: five stars, john green, reviews, the fault in our stars |
