John Green, The Fault in Our Stars and Sick Lit

Some months ago, when John Green's The Fault in Our Stars was finally published in the UK to great hoorah and much tumblring, there was a bit of backlash in the press.

It all started with a piece in the Daily Mail, calling TFiOS "mawkish at best, exploitative at worst". It was a typically brow-beating and spectacular piece of journalism and accomplished very little except to earn its very own backlash, including this piece in the Guardian, and this piece on the Strange Chemistry blog and quite frankly I could go on here forever. Some contemporary teen authors even agreed with the Daily Mail - for the responses from Meg Rosoff and Anthony McGowan, see this blog from author Keren David.

I am late to the party, largely because it's taken me this long to gather my thoughts. For the most part, it's not worth responding to anyway, because it's something of nothing, but still, it's been bugging me.

So after several months of thinking, of losing sleep and pulling my hair out and generally not living life to the full because I'm always thinking about the question of whether 'Sick Lit' is right or wrong or, indeed, anything else, what conclusions have I come to?

I just DON'T CARE.

I think if a book is well-written and engaging and creates an emotional response because as a reader you connect with the characters and the situation they're in, then I'll read it and think it's a good book. I might not like it; it might not be my sort of thing, but that's a different matter, and has nothing to do with whether a book is good or not.

And whether the central characters have cancer is not one of the factors I use to determine a book's placement on a scale of sucky to total genius. It just isn't. It's like saying you don't like a book because it's set in Philadelphia. (HINT: the book isn't going to be about Philadelphia.)

I don't know about you, but I've never seen a section in Waterstone's with a garish sign reading "Cancer Section", and I've never recommended TFiOS by saying "You should read this. It's got awesome cancer."

Besides, we've always liked a bit of death with our romance. The death scene in Romeo & Juliet is only catastrophically heart-breaking because it involves the loss of unlived love. I'd have loved to have seen the Daily Mail put Romeo & Juliet on their list of sick lit. Perhaps there are letters written to head teachers every day begging schools to ban such radical examples of teen sex, murder and suicide, all in the name of love.

There's a beautiful scene in TFiOS, where the two main characters, Augustus and Hazel, visit the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. It reflects on lives lived in forced and involuntary cages, and the sometimes resentful but mostly OK nature of those lives, and the fact that they are lives lived at all and that's what's important and remarkable. It's a scene between two cancer patients in the house of one of the most famously trapped and short lives, and it's not about death. It's about the other thing.

And I think that's something that anyone can relate to, regardless of their age, but it's something particularly true of teens. There are too many things that make you feel trapped as a teen to bother counting, and there are very few ways out of most of them.

There's a reason that this book is being passed from rucksack to rucksack in schools around the country, and it isn't because it's a story about cancer. Trust me.

The fact is that TFiOS, along with so many other 'sick lit' books, is FULL of life, despite everything that conspires against it. It's quirky and funny and the first love between Augustus and Hazel is the first love that everyone wants to have, because it's smart and sexy and just downright awesome (minus the cancer). This is a story of love against the odds, and battles won and lost, and countless other cliches that could be applied to most famous books in our history.

And you know why they can be applied to most famous books in history?

Because The Fault in Our Stars is nothing new.

(It's just exceptionally well-written.)

The Fault in our Stars, by John Green

Seeing as this is a blog about serious teen fiction, what better way to start than to review one of the books of the moment? I should warn you that I started reading this book at around 5pm yesterday, and I finished it three tubes, one train, a hurried walk home so I could start reading again and seven hours later. I may have been close to slipping into unconsciousness by the time I finished this last night, but apparently not close enough to stilt its impact. Not that I cried or anything.

The Fault in our Stars is a book everyone who hasn't been living under an especially large, hibernation-inducing rock has heard about. Like a lot of teen fiction at the moment, it's everywhere, and its following is only growing. And yet - it doesn't have a UK publisher.

How does a book not yet published in the UK gain such a huge following over here?

Because it's freaking awesome, that's why.

Teen fiction does a lot of things. It has strong characters who suck you in, twisting plots that spit you back out and hooks you could hang a blue whale on. Serious teen fiction, however, does something else: it delivers a punch you rarely find in more commercial fiction.

It's often character-driven, for a start, which means that if you wrote down the (action) plot, point by point, you'd often have almost nothing written on the page in front of you.

What's left behind, however, are the characters, and their voices. And boy, does John Green deliver some voices.

Take Hazel, for example, the main character. Hazel is precocious. She's curious. She feels for her place in the world, and then takes the time to stand and admire it. Oh - and she has cancer. The inoperable kind. In fact, it's pretty much the can't-do-anything-about-it kind.

When Augustus Waters turns up at her cancer support group (held in the Literal Heart of Jesus), I'd like to say that everything changes for Hazel, but I don't feel that it does. You could say that it opens doors for her, but Hazel isn't the kind of girl who goes storming through open doors. Quite frankly she'd be happier reading a book. You could say it shows her the breadth of humanity, but Hazel is well aware of how strange and diverse people are. You could say she grows up during the course of the story, but Hazel is already 16 going on 30.

What it does do, is show us the world through the eyes of a dying teenager. It shows us how Hazel feels to find her first love, and how she feels as the world widens and then collapses around her to the sound of the BiPAP that keeps her breathing at night. It shows how she deals with knowing that the moment she dies, the people around her will be left behind to cope with changed lives. And let me tell you, she isn't exactly soppy about it.

Hazel is the kind of character that teen fiction exists for. She's resilient, but not fearless; gutsy but not heroic; curious but not all-knowing. She's the kid sitting on the bus next to you or the girl that lives down the street. She talks like a teenager, processes the world like a teenager and dreams like a teenager.

Which all means that when The Fault in our Stars reaches its end, we feel none of the characters have reached theirs, whatever and wherever they might be.

And that is what I love about serious teen fiction.