** spoiler alert ** 
 My first observation when I began reading this book was how well John Green seemed to capture my understanding of a teen girl's thoughts. They felt real and worked through, not forced or imagined. 
 This book is about a girl who is living day to day with cancer. That right there should have told me to not read this book, but having just recently finished "Emperor of All Maladies" this book seemed like a natural transition. Hazel Grace is only alive by a miracle drug, but she is barely alive as she lives with tubes all around her every day of her life. Her cancer, a form of lung cancer makes it so that she is always desperate for air. Despite this, she meets and falls in love with Augustus, or Gus, who is also a recovered cancer survivor. His cancer started in his leg and he is thus an amputee with a very bright perspective on life. 
 Together they navigate the hardships of their diseases and the losses they have endured as they are surrounded by other cancer patients who are either dead or dying. Hazel becomes obsessed with a writer who wrote a story about a cancer patient, but never explained an ending for the people around her when she died. The author is a recluse who invites them to visit him in Amsterdam. 
 During the trip Gus reveals that he is off remission and he is being slowly reclaimed by the cancer. 
 When they return, Gus gets sicker and sicker, and I think it was the raw imagery of a cancer patient that really got me. It was my mother I saw in these scenes. Holding on to life even though she knew it was no longer hers. Hazel's greatest concern as she heads towards her eventual death is the concern that her parents and her friends would stop living once she died. She didn't want to be a "bomb". 
 After Gus dies, she is left only to ponder her own life and eventually learns her parents are preparing for her death and it is only here when she realizes that it'll be okay. I think that Hazel's acceptance of her disease, even though she hates it is the most powerful thing of this book. Cancer is so consuming that it is easy to just give up and while she almost does sometimes, Hazel always keep her head up, she never feel self pity and I think makes this book a hopeful one, especially when hope is so rare when cancer rears its head.