You are bound to love this book. It is witty, funny and deeply moving, you'll devour it in three days and cry a lot in the process. 
 So the question is: why not five stars? Isn't it a bit of an hypocrisy on my part considering that I gave higher votes to less worthy books just because they positively surprised o captured me? 
 The point with this book is that I feel some sort of emotional overload around it, as if the highly touching story somehow forces us to consider it a masterpiece. 
 But as I said for The Orange Girl , does a book deserve five stars " just" because it made you cry? 
 Beside the fact that the only way not to be affected by the story of a group of young kids battling with cancer is that your everyday occupation is being a killer for a drug cartel, I can't shake off the impression that this is essentially a very smart book. 
 Hazel, Gus and Isaac, the main characters are brave but not too brave, witty but not supercilious, sick but not whiny, in other words they are exactly how we like to think people with terminal diseases are because let's face it: it' easier being supportive, caring and understanding toward people who don't complain too much, people who are not just suffering all the time. To be honest, we get a glimpse in the book of the suffering, the pain, the puke but it is often washed away by some witty remark, just enough for us to feel the pity (exactly what these kids are escaping from) and walk forward. 
 Despite a great abundance of supposedly deep meaning aphorisms like the over-cited "Pain demands to be felt" which teenagers of all the world can write on their diaries framed by little hearts I didn't really get what the author was aiming at. 
 I can generally agree that we never talk enough of incurable diseases and that everything that draws the attention to the condition of people affected by these illnesses and their relatives is a good thing which helps us remember that we can give something to them beside un-required pity but aside from these considerations I felt Green's book was a bit shallow. 
 The main theme of the story is the desire of not being forgotten once we're gone and the difficulty of doing something meaningful that will live a mark on this earth when you will not live past your teens. The main conflict between Hazel and Gus is exactly about this "obsession" of being remembered which, for Gus, becomes the need of doing something spectacular while for Hazel lies more in the hole you'll leave in the life of those you leave behind. 
 The dilemma is very interesting and possibly unsolvable but Green barely sketches it as a frame for cliche situations like a romantic trip to a "fairy tale" Amsterdam and cliche characters such as the literary idol of the two protagonists who predictably turns out to be a total douche bag. 
 This said I reaffirm that I liked the book, I think that the author did a good job of depicting the everyday life of cancer patients (despite some "poetic license") and his witty style is highly enjoyable.