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.
BOOK:
I'm probably going to shock a lot of you right now who have read this book and loved it. Because I, didn't. Sure, it's a good book but it's not something I would have picked up outside the frenzy that is surrounding it's popularity right now.
The book was a good, fast, read. I liked it, but I didn't love it. I was not left with the feeling that I HAD to pass it on, or even talk about it much. This is so out of the ordinary for me because this is typically by kind of book I dwell in once it's over.
MOVIE:
As if my review of the book wasn't shocking enough, let me just really hit you hard with another shocker- I loved the movie.
I'm the first one to tell you that books are ALWAYS better than the movie, and I still stand beside that. However, this movie definitely was better than the book to me for some reason. I think the characters were portrayed well and pretty accurate.
This makes the second book I will pick the movie over the book. My first being Nights in Rodanthe. (Talk about a TEAR jerker!)
What did YOU think of the movie/book?
