Hazel Grace is a girl who suffered from a cancer and struggling with life every day and night. Because of her health condition, Hazel rarely leaves the house, spends quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book -called An Imperial Affliction over and over, and devotes quite a bit of her abundant free time thinking about death.
One day at a Support Group, she met an attractive guy who is called Gus and soon they fell in love with each other. She recommended this book to him and they discussed about this book quite often. Interestingly, this book had no ending which confused both Hazel and Gus very much. Time marches, Gus noticed that Hazel is really into that book and desperately wants to know what happened to those characters in the book after the ending of the story. So he donated his one and only wish to help Hazel to achieve her dream. The author of the AIA is Peter Van Houten who moved to Amsterdam after the huge success of the novel. Therefore, they went to Amsterdam together to find Peter to ask what happened to those characters after the finish of the story. However, things didn’t go very smooth with Peter.
At the very last day of the journey, Gus told Hazel that his days are counting down and told her that he will write something to make it up to her. Gus died few days later after their arrival at home. The other day one of the Gus’s friends called Hazel and mentioned about his writings and Hazel finally found the writing which showed his yearnings for living and all of his toward Hazel.
For me, this is a heart-breaking and at the same time, it is a haunting story. I mean you cannot get rid of it. Gus is such a brilliant and interesting and intelligent guy and Hazel is such a brave and fearless girl. Although they got cancer, I don’t think they have any differences between us. They are also human beings that need love and care.
This book makes me think about a lot of things, especially about life. Every man dies, not everyman really lives. I think the two characters did live it well. At least they have nothing to regret. They did what they want and they loved what they love, whole heartedly. I guess the FAULT here means their puzzles To love or not to love. When it comes to love, I don’t think there is fault in it as long as you truly love something. Gus gave Hazel a very remarkable memory and Hazel added color to Gus’s life during his last few days.
My face was soaked in my tears when I’m reading it. One of the most important things about reading is that we can go through different lives when we are reading different books. It leads us to think, to put ourselves in other’s shoes. In this book, I noticed the fragility of life and the solidity of human beings. No matter what happens, nothing changes really about love though. It’s a lifelong topic.
So cherish what you have, people! You live only once and you have no idea what other people’s going through and at the same time, you will never know what is going to happen…
