It seems fitting to begin a blog about kids' and YA books with the YA book everyone is talking about. John Green is currently on tour in the US, where he is being mobbed by hysterical teenage girls in a manner normally reserved for rock stars. I admit, I'm jealous (I have always dreamed of being mobbed by teenage girls:)). Seriously: I'm jealous because he writes so well, and yet I found myself perplexed by this book. John Green and the media surrounding him write that this is not a cancer book, and yet it is a book about teenagers with cancer. Spoiler alert: one goes blind, one dies, one is still alive at the end of the book but we know there is little hope of her surviving. In the meantime, they fall in love, they have furious conversations about books and life and literature, they travel to Amsterdam to visit their hero, an unpleasant drunk writer who is mourning the loss of his own teenage daughter to, you guessed it, cancer. This book is raw. And funny. And a little bit self-indulgent in its cleverness and wit.
And it's about cancer.
But it's not a cancer book. It's about more than cancer.
Just as people with cancer are not cancer people.
That's the point, of course, and it's a point well made.
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