A little over a week ago I was at a conference and a friend of mine was telling me that she was amused by my reading habits on Goodreads now that I was finished with doctoral work which had dominated my reading habits for several years. I have read more novels in the past eleven months than I had in the preceding few years. In the context of the conversation she suggested I read “The Fault in Our Stars” by Indianapolis writer John Green. “Young people in your congregation are reading it,” she advised, “You should be current with what they are reading.” Then she paused, and said, “Maybe not. It’s got a lot of sadness in it.” She said that knowing that I had experienced the deaths of two of my children and thinking that this novel about two teens battling cancer and trying to figure out life might be too intense for my reality laden life.

However, having my curiosity piqued, I decided to spend most of a Saturday reading the book. Here are some of my thoughts. I will tell you that if you have not read the book and you do not want to spoil the plot you might not want to read further.

“The Fault in Our Stars” is primarily a teen romance novel although it tries to transcend that genre by dealing with some more mature life and death issues dealing with cancer and mortality. The novel is very popular with young adult readers but has garnered a significant amount of criticism for the teen characters, who many believe are more mature in their thinking than most teenagers. I really was not struck by that one way or the other, never having been a teenage girl, which is the perspective of the first person narrative, or having had terminal cancer, an important identifying factor in the ethos of the plot.

However, I have been a bereaved parent twice, and my main complaint with the novel is with the adult characters, who are often one step above the indistinguishable adult voices in a Charlie Brown special. You can attribute some of the way the adults are caricatures of real people by the fact that the novel is written from a sixteen-year-old’s perspective and that is how she experiences them. However, leaving out the two dimensional portrayal of the support group convener or the over-the-top inebriation of the God typology author (Peter Van Houten), there are a couple of items with the parents that seem too significant to really ignore.

Toward the end of the novel the two main characters, Hazel and Augustus, take a trip to Amsterdam with Hazel’s mom. Hazel has had a life threatening episode just before the trip and throughout the novel her mother is rarely out of earshot. However, even though they are thousands of miles away from the doctors with the most knowledge about her condition, Hazel’s mom suddenly abandons all concern for her daughter and heads off on her own while the young couple travel about the city mostly alone. That just seems very improbable – actually unbelievable. It is, of course, necessary to the teen romance part of the plot since the young couple needs this unsupervised time to consummate their romance. I think this is one time when the novel diverges from its mostly realistic portrayal of the end stages of cancer. No parent whose daughter had just had her lungs drained of fluid would go sightseeing alone and leave her daughter to her own devices, or the care of a seventeen-year-old boyfriend, in that circumstance.

The second major area of implausibility to me is the way the two sets of parents are portrayed. And that is that they are consistently portrayed as sets without individual voices. Having walked with many families through the last days of their children’s lives as well as the days after children’s deaths, I can say that it is extremely rare for a couple not to disagree on the treatment and care of a sick child, especially a terminally ill child. And yet, these two couples never argue with one another and consistently speak with one voice. This is not how it works in the real work. Couples wrestle with treatment decisions and rarely have complete agreement on what to do next. This is why the divorce rate among bereaved parents is so high. It is possible, but highly improbably, that two sets of parents would respond in unison like the novel portrays them.

Overall, the novel has been popular for its stark realism in portraying the teenage cancer patients and I have no reason to dispute that assessment. However, I found the adult characters two-dimensional and mostly superficial.