CBR IV: Read Free or Cannonball Hard, Entry 2: "The Fault In Our Stars" by John Green

Every time I read something John Green has written, I marvel at his ability to make me feel like the characters involved are not only real, but that they are actually falling in love.  There's just something about his prose that makes you feel like you're even falling in love yourself.  In "An Abundance of Katherines", the love story angle comes in late in the game but still manages to click with the reader as if it had been introduced on Page 1.  In "A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle", the romance was a slow burn to an obvious, yet still fantastically lovely reveal.  "The Fault In Our Stars" shows John Green making us fall in love yet again, but setting us up for an even greater heartache than that of a lover leaving us by choice...a lover who leaves through death.

Hazel and Augustus meet in a support group for teenage cancer patients.  Like some great love stories before this one, it all started with a memory...Hazel reminds Augustus of his late ex-girlfriend, who much like himself had a terminal illness.  Through their mutual friend, Issac, the two meet-cute and begin a fast developing romance that culminates in a trip to Amsterdam to stalk a famous American author into divulging secrets of the unwritten history to his own major novel's protagonists.  Through their time together and the adventures they share their love only grows, even though there's a silent clock ticking down the unknown minutes and seconds left in their lives.  Indeed one of our lovers will pass before the end of the book, taking the lightly comedic and romantic plot (only tinged with sadness) into a full blown tragedy.

Green works his magic yet again, taking something that sounds like Nicholas Sparks for the Tween/Teen reader set and turning it into something with more depth and weight.  We know from the start that our leads are sick and that time is running out.  Our leads even know it.  The story isn't focused on "who dies and how", it focuses on how they live in each other's company.  How they choose to carry on in the face of impending death is the feat that is focused on, because knowing the odds and the scenario all to well these characters know that there's slim to no hope of survival.  By the third act, I was absolutely in tears; the last thirty pages or so being a culmination of so much symbolism and ground work built in the first two acts.  Yet again, John Green manages to make the reader fall in love and then manages to gut punch them with the sadness of reality.  When you build your characters and scenario well enough, such as Mr. Green has in this novel, an ending such as this is not a cheap grab at emotion...it's telling the emotional truth of the moment.  I look forward to finishing his existing canon, at which point I shall eagerly await his next work of fiction.

Next Up: "The Hunger Games Trilogy" (The Hunger Games/Catching Fire/Mockingjay) by Suzanne Collins

The Cannonball Read III - Osaka Slide: #1 - Let It Snow; by John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle

It's time to start The Cannonball Read 3, lit freaks!  How do you know when it's time?  It's simple:  when you see Vin Diesel up on your screen, you know it's time for another CR3 review!  Whether it will be this static image of Vin or different images of different roles he's played, I do not know.  (But I do welcome input.)  Anyhow, let's get things started off nice and easy with some Holiday Romance!

Teen literature is a genre that I should have practically overgrown by about a good eleven years (eight years in the literal sense).  Yet somehow when I found An Abundance of Katherines by John Green, it connected to the younger me instantaneously.  His stories of teenage boys fixated on quirky girls for some reason or another, along with the 4-ish star reviews for each of his books made me more interested in reading his works, seeing as I was one of those boys and he must have been too.  I came into reading Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances with expectations that I would love the Green story but not care for the Johnson and Myracle story.  What I left with was exceeded expectations, and only in the best way.

The basic premise of Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances is a simple one: three stories of teens in love at Christmas in the same North Carolina town.  Three different authors use the same character set/setting, and as each story progresses, we're introduced/re-introduced to characters that will become part of each story.  Some characters are mentioned off hand, some interact with other protagonists, and others are just a constant part of the background moving the plot along. Basically, this plays like an American version of Love Actually that takes place during the course of one evening.  (Except in this case, it works beautifully.  Take THAT "Valentine's Day"!)

We start off with Maureen Johnson's "The Jubilee Express"; a story involving a girl whose parents are in jail (for rather ridiculous, non violent reasons), whose boyfriend is rather distant (and an overachiever), and whose trip to Florida turns into a trek through the snow with some guy she hardly knows.  Ms. Johnson has the unenviable task of building the blocks to the world we're about to spend a good portion of time in and she does it wonderfully by making us tag along with a girl from Virginia.  Just like her, we're new to town and we're learning the lay of the land through the people we meet.  Eventually, Jubilee (Johnson's pensive protagonist) is stranded in said North Carolina town and meets Stuart, a local with a broken heart.  Through their trek in the snow to his house, she begins to think things through with her current relationship as she figures out what to do next.  "The Jubilee Express" surprised me, because I thought I'd have a hard time identifying with a young teenage girl and her relationship woes, but I actually found myself somewhat invested in the outcome of her story and enjoyed it quite a bit.  Jubilee isn't too witty or hip, she's just a cut above the rest, and the only problem is that the ending seems a little too rushed.

Johnson's set up leads to what I feel is my favorite story of the collection (no, not due to personal bias), John Green's "A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle".  The train Jubilee came in on was also carrying fourteen Pennsylvania cheerleaders on their way to a competition.  Stranded with nothing to do, they decided to go into a Waffle House to warm up/keep limber.  This pleases young Keun, the acting manager at said Waffle House.  It pleases him enough to invite two separate groups of friends to join him in Cheertastic bliss: a group of rowdy college guys and our protagonistic trio (Angie 'The Duke', JP, and Tobin).  There's a catch though:  only one group of friends can stay, and whoever has the Twister board has the power.  As if that weren't enough, the roads are crap and our protagonists end up having to walk to the Waffle House, avoid a pair of evil twins, and ultimately confront some feelings budding within their group.  Much like in An Abundance of Katherines, Green displays that he knows how to write humorous characters with introspective bents that happen to be falling in love.  And when his characters fall in love, it almost always turns out to be extremely sweet.  The romance in this story is only matched by the humor, which basically sums up Green's contribution to literature at large.

The final story, "The Patron Saint of Pigs" by Lauren Myracle, ties everything (and everyone) together into a pretty adorable ending where every couple we've encountered ends up at the same Starbucks, but not before a mini-adventure of self discovery.  One of the baristas at this particular coffee shop, a girl by the name of Addison (aka Addie), had promised her friend that she'd pick up a Mini-Pig that she adopted through a local pet store.  This, of course, had to be the day after Christmas, whilst enduring the fallout of both the winter blizzard and a break-up between her and her boyfriend (now ex).  All the while, the Universe seems to be sending her messages that she's a little too self involved and needs to put it all on hold for others.  As she treks to get the pig and sort out her cosmic destiny, she learns quite a bit and ultimately changes for the better.  What's particularly unique about this story is it seemed to have a sort of Christmas Carol vibe to it, seeing as while Addie is running one uber important errand, she runs into people indirectly trying to help her change. Although the ending is a bit of a stretch to have everyone in one room, I'm not going to argue it because books of this ilk require the amount of suspension of disbelief.

This book was an honest surprise that comes of sweeter than a "Holiday Romance" novel has any business of doing.  As I'd mentioned before the ending is rather serendipitous, but if there were a time for serendipity it may as well be Christmas.  Each story clocks in at about 100 pages and change, and the prose is a breezy read for those who want a little holiday cheer.  I would go as far to say that these three writers have made me hope that for every Mormon Mom with a wet dream, there are at least three of these whip smart writers to take her down and show us that not every teenager is a clumsy idiot who's waiting for someone to dash them away.

 Next Up: Oogy: The Dog Only a Family Could Love by Larry Levin

 

"An Abundance of Katherines" by John Green

Getting dumped makes a person look inwards just a little too much.  We wonder what we've done to draw this fate upon our person, we think about whether we really deserved it or not, but mostly we just can't help but wanting the person who dumped us back.  Maybe it's because our emotional investment isn't as easily forgotten as that of the person who dumped us, or maybe we're just fixated with how things work and how they eventually don't.  Colin Singleton is a little bit of both, and throughout his life he's had one major quirk when it comes to his dating life...all 19 of his girlfriends have been named Katherine.

An Abundance of Katherines tells Colin's story of introspection and fixation as he tries to make the leap from "Prodigy" (someone who can learn really fast) to "Genius" (someone who can create unique, intellectual  properties and ideas).  To do this, he's taken his introspective eye and started to plot out the relationships he's had with all 19 Katherines onto graphs that use a mathematical formula he's created to pinpoint where and when a relationship begins and ends.  More importantly, he believes his formula can figure out who will dump whom in the relationship, thus separating people into two flat categories: Dumpers and Dumpees.  None of this would have been possible if it weren't for his best friend Hassan and his decision to drag his best friend on a road trip to the South, but don't tell him that...geniuses are rather sensitive of their capability for independent thought.

I discovered this book, on happy coincidence, through a Barnes and Noble clearance sale not too long ago. Up until that point, I'd never heard of John Green or any of the books that he had written. However, the concepts intrigued me as they centered around similar premises: young man falls for a somewhat quirky girl and goes on a journey to find out more about himself and deal with said romance. The variation on the theme in An Abundance of Katherines: our protagonist is dealing with the absence of romance instead of the pursuit of it.

John Green has honestly and truthfully written a character I can believe exists in real life, particularly because I see shades of myself within Colin.  Ok, so I wasn't a prodigy in anything except reading, but I was considered a "smart kid".  As many "smart kids" know, once High School is over, the rest looks pretty competitive and downhill.  Colin is so ahead of the curve with his contemporaries that he sees what they won't see for a little while longer...High School, if your not careful, is where you peak.  The trick to not peaking is simple in concept, but hard in execution: do something that makes your name stand out.  It is this journey that Colin embarks on, mostly because it keeps his mind off of Katherine (whom we learn more about as the book goes on), that he tries to actually matter to the world.  His heartache, his longing, and eventually his rejuvenation at the prospect of a new love is all extremely human and extremely identifiable.  This book may be written as "Young Adult Fiction", but age the characters a bit and change the setting, and you've still got a story that's at times poignant and at times funny.

I might not have heard of John Green before discovering and reading this book, but I can see why all of his books have consistently high Amazon and Barnes and Noble customer ratings.  Green's characters are real people, with real experiences and journeys, thoughts, and hopes.  They just live in a world parallel to ours where things are slightly different.  For what it's worth, I enjoy that slightly different world quite a bit; where problems are solved with road trips, bravery is found during a hog hunt, and ultimately all of the answers reveal themselves to you through a piece of paper, a phone call, and a moderately adventurous trip down South. 

A read that should never have to be a "Bargain Book" (but is especially worth the effort of procuring should you find it at such a price)  An Abundance of Katherines is one of the highest recommendations I can give, especially for a piece of YA Fiction.  These are characters I can relate to, events I can remember dealing with myself, and happenings I kind of wish I could have had myself as a teenager.  I can't wait to read more of Mr. Green's work, because if it's as captivating as this book was, I won't have a problem buying the whole lot in an instant.