Gr 9 Up-"It's not fair," complains 16-year-old Hazel from Indiana. "The world," says Gus, her new friend from her teen support group, "is not a wish-granting factory." Indeed, life is not fair; Hazel and Gus both have cancer, Hazel's terminal. Despite this, she has a burning obsession: to find out what happens to the characters after the end of her favorite novel. An Imperial Affliction by Dutch author Peter Van Houten is about a girl named Anna who has cancer, and it ends in mid-sentence (presumably to indicate a life cut short), a stylistic choice that Hazel appreciates but the ambiguity drives her crazy. Did the "Dutch Tulip Man" marry Anna's mom? What happened to Sisyphus the Hamster? Hazel asks her questions via email and Van Houten responds, claiming that he can only tell her the answers in person. When she was younger, Hazel used her wish-one granted to sick children from The Genie Foundation-by going to Disney World. Gus decides to use his to take Hazel to Amsterdam to meet the author. Like most things in life, the trip doesn't go exactly as anticipated. Van Houten is a disappointment, but Hazel, who has resisted loving Gus because she doesn't want to be the grenade that explodes in his life when she dies, finally allows herself to love. Once again Green offers a well-developed cast of characters capable of both reflective thought and hilarious dialogue. With his trademark humor, lovable parents, and exploration of big-time challenges, The Fault in Our Stars is an achingly beautiful story about life and loss.-Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's School, Brooklyn, NY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* At 16, Hazel Grace Lancaster, a three-year stage IV-cancer survivor, is clinically depressed. To help her deal with this, her doctor sends her to a weekly support group where she meets Augustus Waters, a fellow cancer survivor, and the two fall in love. Both kids are preternaturally intelligent, and Hazel is fascinated with a novel about cancer called An Imperial Affliction. Most particularly, she longs to know what happened to its characters after an ambiguous ending. To find out, the enterprising Augustus makes it possible for them to travel to Amsterdam, where Imperial's author, an expatriate American, lives. What happens when they meet him must be left to readers to discover. Suffice it to say, it is significant. Writing about kids with cancer is an invitation to sentimentality and pathos or worse, in unskilled hands, bathos. Happily, Green is able to transcend such pitfalls in his best and most ambitious novel to date. Beautifully conceived and executed, this story artfully examines the largest possible considerations life, love, and death with sensitivity, intelligence, honesty, and integrity. In the process, Green shows his readers what it is like to live with cancer, sometimes no more than a breath or a heartbeat away from death. But it is life that Green spiritedly celebrates here, even while acknowledging its pain. In its every aspect, this novel is a triumph. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Green's promotional genius is a force of nature. After announcing he would sign all 150,000 copies of this title's first print run, it shot to the top of Amazon and Barnes & Noble's best-seller lists six months before publication.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist

Hazel Grace and Augustus meet at a cancer-kids support group. Hazel's lungs are filled with tumors; Augustus is (apparently) cancer-free after a leg amputation. Their love story takes most of the book to unfold, and as it does, author Green takes us through a painfully hopeful look at living with cancer. Green gets so much right here -- the voices, emotions, and vocabulary of smart and savvy teens -- and Rudd amplifies Greens insights with her spot-on narration. Hazel's aching narrative goes straight to the heart. As a reader, you can sometimes distance yourself from the pain she experiences, but as a listener, you are dragged wholesale into the drama and passion that is a teenage girls existence. Through expert pacing, tear-filled words, breaths of pain, and angst-ridden outbursts, Rudd becomes Hazel; the listener becomes Hazel's confidante. This is a fine production of an excellent novel, but listener be warned: driving while crying can be dangerous. Be prepared to pull the car over. Angela J. Reynolds (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An Imperial Affliction, her only friend besides her parents. He asks her over, and they swap novels. He agrees to read the Van Houten and she agrees to read his--based on his favorite bloodbath-filled video game. The two become connected at the hip, and what follows is a smartly crafted intellectual explosion of a romance. From their trip to Amsterdam to meet the reclusive Van Houten to their hilariously flirty repartee, readers will swoon on nearly every page. Green's signature style shines: His carefully structured dialogue and razor-sharp characters brim with genuine intellect, humor and desire. He takes on Big Questions that might feel heavy handed in the words of any other author: What do oblivion and living mean? Then he deftly parries them with humor: "My nostalgia is so extreme that I am capable of missing a swing my butt never actually touched." Dog-earing of pages will no doubt ensue. Green seamlessly bridges the gap between the present and the existential, and readers will need more than one box of tissues to make it through Hazel and Gus' poignant journey. (Fiction. 15 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"I AM not a mathematician, but I know this," says Hazel Grace Lancaster, the narrator of "The Fault in Our Stars," the latest novel by John Green, a Michael L. Printz medalist and author of several best-selling novels for young adults. "There are infinite numbers between zero and one. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others." The trouble, she says, is, "I want more numbers than I'm likely to get." This is a problem faced by the heroines in both "The Fault in Our Stars" and "The Probability of Miracles," two young adult novels about 16-year-old girls who have cancer: their days are numbered. At the outset, the two books are remarkably similar. Both begin by bluntly describing the harsh realities of life as a cancer patient through the wry sensibility of a smart, sarcastic teenage girl. They are both surprisingly funny and entertaining, given the subject matter, and both are at heart teenage love stories. About halfway through, though, "The Probability of Miracles" veers off in one direction - toward the miracles of the title - while "The Fault in Our Stars" stays the course of tragic realism. And that's where the difference lies. Campbell Cooper, the heroine of Wendy Wunder's first novel, is a child of Disney World: her parents were both fire dancers in the "Spirit of Aloha" show at the Polynesian Hotel. Growing up in a manufactured fantasy world has made Cam understandably cynical. When her doctor reports that her cancer has spread and medical science has done all it can, Cam resigns herself to dying. Then she comes across a "Flamingo List" she made a year earlier, a list of everything she wants to do before she dies, things she imagines to be part of a normal adolescence, like "Lose my virginity at a keg party," "Kill my little sister's dreams" and "Experiment with petty shoplifting." It's time to start crossing things off the Flamingo List, and so she starts with the easiest one: shoplifting. Cam has accepted that she's going to die. But her mother and little sister want her to keep fighting, to believe in miracles. Hoping Cam will learn to "trust how the universe unfolds," her mother insists on a road trip to Promise, Me., a mystical town known for its healing powers. Promise, a sparkling New England village, is as much of a fantasy - if a less plasticized version - as the world Cam left behind in Florida. Upon their arrival, a handsome boy named Asher invites her and her family to stay in his gorgeous mansion overlooking the ocean. And though Cam resists the idea, Promise does appear to be full of miracles. The sunsets last for hours. Orcas improbably leap out of the bay in the evening. There are purple dandelions, a rainbow at night, snow in July and an unlikely flock of flamingoes. And Cam feels better. She can eat again; she has energy. Though she is "hoperesistant," that begins to change. Cam has setbacks, but eventually she succumbs to the spell of Promise and Asher, a hunky football star who reads James Joyce for fun. Even Cam says, "A person can be too perfect, you know." By the end of the summer, she has crossed everything off her Flamingo List Meanwhile, her sarcasm has lost its edge, and alas, so has the book. When Cam's story, which starts out so gritty and real, devolves into fantasy, the sense of what dying young of cancer is really like is lost. The grim reality is always present, however, in Hazel Lancaster, the heroine of "The Fault in Our Stars," who narrates her story in a hip, angry, funny tone similar to Cam's. Hazel has thyroid cancer that has spread calamitously to her lungs when she meets Augustus Waters, a former basketball player who has lost a leg to osteosarcoma, at a support group for cancer kids in Indianapolis. Augustus lends Hazel his favorite book, "The Price of Dawn," the "brilliant and haunting novelization of my favorite video game," so she lends him hers: "An Imperial Affliction" by Peter Van Houten, about a girl who has cancer. Van Houten ends his novel abruptly in the middle of a sentence, and Hazel is obsessed with finding out what happened to the characters. Augustus, too, becomes riveted by "An Imperial Affliction," and uses his "wish" from "The Genie Foundation," an organization devoted to the cheering up of sick children, to send himself and Hazel to Amsterdam to meet Van Houten. At first Augustus, like Asher, seems too good to be true. He's sexy and smart, and he appears to want nothing more than to do nice things for Hazel. But we come to understand how Gus's illness has forced him to confront the big questions of life and death. Over the course of the narrative, his appealing exterior breaks down; his flaws, fears and humiliations are exposed, yet he is all the more lovable for his frailty and heartbreaking humanity. Like "The Probability of Miracles," this is a love story, but it is also a book by John Green, author of "Looking for Alaska" and "Paper Towns," and it is written in his signature tone, a blend of melancholy, sweet, philosophical and funny. When Hazel decides to give away her childhood swing set because the sight of it depresses her, she considers this headline for the Craigslist ad: "Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children." Green's characters may be improbably witty, but even under the direst circumstances they are the kind of people you wish you knew. If the story takes a grimmer turn than that of "The Probability of Miracles," the characters compel the reader to stick with them. "The Fault in Our Stars" is all the more heart-rending for its bluntness about the medical realities of cancer. There are harrowing descriptions of pain, shame, anger and bodily fluids of every type. It is a narrative without rainbows or flamingoes; there are no magical summer snowstorms. Instead, Hazel has to lug a portable oxygen tank with her wherever she goes, and Gus has a prosthetic leg. Their friend Isaac is missing an eye and later goes blind. These unpleasant details do nothing to diminish the romance; in Green's hands, they only make it more moving. He shows us true love - two teenagers helping and accepting each other through the most humiliating physical and emotional ordeals - and it is far more romantic than any sunset on the beach. As Hazel and Gus often remind each other, the world is not a wish-granting factory. Nevertheless, "a forever within the numbered days" can be found, and as Hazel shows us, maybe that's all we can ask for. Natalie Standiford is the author of "How to Say Goodbye in Robot" and "Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters." Her next novel, "The Secret Tree," will be published in May.