He’s groomed to kidnap foreigners and to eavesdrop on foreign transmissions, but, after a diplomatic mission gone wrong, he’s packed off to a prison mine. His hero, Pak Jun Do, is an everyman-Jun Do being a homonym for “John Doe”-raised by an official in charge of orphans, who may or may not have been his father. Adam Johnson, in his phantasmagoric journey to North Korea, had to tell his tale while avoiding the merely sensational or lurid. Green had to negotiate tragedy without being maudlin or manipulative.
Having spent the better part of my teen years with a terminally ill friend, I couldn’t read this book, and its descriptions of humiliating physical frailty, without feeling that it’s never too early to teach your children about life’s fragility and transience. It’s all too easy for a YA writer to put kids in horrible situations, but Fault is a nightmare recollected in good faith. Their pain is real and Hazel must wrestle with it, as when she overhears her mom voicing the fear that, after Hazel’s death, she “won’t be a mother anymore.” The grownups aren’t one-dimensional buffoons.
Some of his finest scenes depict Hazel at odds with her parents and, in the spirit of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn, with her author/quarry.
Green shows the adult world in its variety and complexity, too. Green’s genius is to make Hazel sound superficially like a teenager (her cancer-ruined lungs, e.g., “suck at being lungs”) but mostly like an individual, with personality and interiority, fear and love, and vast reserves of wonder and gratitude. Hazel put me in mind of Mattie Ross, the heroine of Charles Portis’s True Grit, not because they’re both young, flinty, and female, but because their voices make you forget that someone invented them. They share a passion for reading, and embark on a quest to fulfill Hazel’s wish, to track down a reclusive novelist and find out what happens after the mid-sentence ending of his book An Imperial Affliction, Hazel’s favorite, about a child with cancer.Īn author’s conception of what precocity looks like can be grating-see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-but Hazel and Augustus, with their sarcasm (Augustus calls losing a leg “an excellent weight-loss strategy”), tough-minded philosophizing, and occasional vulnerability, are terrific. There she meets Augustus, who lost a leg to osteosarcoma and keeps an unlit cigarette in his mouth to “put the killing thing between teeth” without giving it “the power to do its killing.” The star-crossed duo falls in love over the course of 300 pages, Hazel reluctantly, Augustus less so. Their appeal is far wider than that.įault is narrated by Hazel, a teen thyroid cancer survivor whose treatment for depression (a side effect not of cancer but “of dying,” as Hazel deadpans in our first taste of her hardboiled outlook) includes grudging participation in a support group. Each has a pretty well-defined target audience- Fault is YA lit designed to make brainy teens cry themselves to sleep, while Orphan is brainy spy lit designed to make middle-aged Stratfor subscribers drink themselves to death. Not only did John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son make my problems look like cupcakes and apple juice they were also two of the most entertaining books I’ve read in ages. Instead, you’ll get to choose between a children’s hospital and a North Korean prison mine. Then your Tournament selections arrive-and they aren’t, it seems, going to transport you to Cabo San Lucas or South Padre Island at peak sexuality-exploring season. The heating element in your dryer is fried, forcing you to drive to Walmart in an undershirt and swim trunks to buy a pack of clean underwear. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s January.