That is until she meets Augustus Waters, an osteosarcoma survivor with “a hell of a jawline.” They exchange novels, travel to Amsterdam together on what they call a “cancer perk” (a.k.a. Hazel also quietly mocks the Bible-thumping leader of her cancer support group, an acoustic-guitar-wielding dolt. In her spare time Hazel reads a dense, self-reflective book called An Imperial Affliction (also dreamed up by Green) by a reclusive author named Peter Van Houten, about-how very meta-a teenage girl who is dying of leukemia. In The Fault in Our Stars, cancer doesn’t render you strong and stoic but precocious.

She has no patience for her pre-diagnosis friends, one of whom (a character removed from the story in the film adaptation) seems to spend all of her time at the mall while Hazel takes courses at the local college. Hazel’s cancer makes her physically beholden to her parents, of course-kind and simple folk who chaperone her around town and encourage her to make friends-but it also seems to make her preternaturally mature. But more than anything else, it tries on adulthood. Like most YA novels and films, TFIOS plays with themes of morbidity, first love and alienation. She’d already be dead, she tells us, if it weren’t for phalanxifor, a “miracle drug” (dreamed up by Green) that prevents her lungs from filling up with fluid. The disease has, in her own words, transformed her once-functional lungs into “lungs that suck.” Not only does she have to wear a nasal cannula, a respiratory aid that pumps air through her nose, she’s also hooked up to an oxygen tank resembling a golf bag on wheels, which she’s forced to cart around with her wherever she goes. Hazel, the story’s protagonist, played by breakout star Shailene Woodley ( Divergent) in the book’s film adaptation out this month, is a mousy, thoughtful 16-year-old girl living in Indianapolis with stage 4 thyroid cancer. To the unmatched delight of hundreds of thousands of preteen girls around the world, they consummate their love in its terminal grip. Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, the young, ill-fated couple central to Green’s bestselling book, The Fault in Our Stars, don’t battle a supernatural or dystopian force, but a real one: cancer. Today’s most popular YA lovers are not only mortal they may not even live to see tomorrow.

Now thanks to American author and YouTube star John Green, recently dubbed “the Teen Whisperer” in The New Yorker, that status quo has shifted. That’s because romantic yearning in young adult (YA) ﬁction has for the last decade been defined by immortality. Unless they were staked through the heart or deprived of their daily helping of hemoglobin, it’s safe to say the vampire hunks of teen sagas Twilight and The Vampire Diaries would brood over their adolescent girlfriends until the end of time.

Genre of the fault in our stars