I must be clear from the beginning. This is perhaps the most personal review I have written. My choice of stars was difficult for this. I am a self confessed John Green fan, I believe he is amongst the best of, not only YA, but fiction writers out there in general.
This is a beautifully written book. There is very little to complain about in terms of style, plot, character, etc. However I couldn't, in all good concious, give this any higher because it sits so badly with me. I have let this novel marinate for a couple of days now before writing this, and I just keep coming back to the same issues. Namely:

Was this John Green's story to tell?

It is the human condition to attempt to find hope in hopeless situations. But let me attempt to explain how watching a 17 year old fade away truly feels. Because when the wit and words are stripped away I am not sure John did that.

It is endless. It is an unavoidable and uncontrollable and an all encompassing darkness where no hope or life or explanations exist.

There are absolutely no life lessons to be gained from watching a 17 year old cease to exist. There is no comfort. The lessons that some may claim you can achieve through the darkest night of the soul reveal most of humanity for the selfish, narcissistic beings we are.

I have come to believe there is a special kind of cruelty behind the perfectly cross stitched 'encouragement'. Those things are for the ones left over trying to make sense of the senseless.

Whilst I believe this novel acknowledges that. It tries not to, as the main protagonists claimed theirselves, set the victims of disease up as typical heroic, worldly wise characters, it still reads like a novel attempting to bring equilibrium out of disaster. The victims ultimately still are wise beyond their years. This, it seems, is an assumed side effect of a teenager coming to terms with their mortality. They use metaphors and pretentious poetry and a sharp wit and are wholly unbelievable as real life teenagers. They are constructs of an ideal. They are the literary version of Dawson's Creek, using SAT vocabulary and existential navel gazing, whilst simultaneously slamming the typical genre for using its characters to do the same.

Having lived this first hand; once with a brother who ceases to exist at 17 and a second time with a brother who is currently 2 years NEC. I am all too familiar with the need for light hearted humour at what may feel like the most inappropriate of times. But what differs from that and attempting to write a disease ridden novel that attempts to make you laugh, is apparently personal experience.

I have the right to sit around a Christmas table laughing somewhat hysterically at nothing. My living brother has the right to crack UNO-ball jokes whenever the opportunity arises. But none of the readers of this novel who have not experienced the kind of loss depicted here have a right to laugh at any of it. You can not claim it as your own unless it is yours, and in my mind that is what humour does. It is not appropriate for me to laugh along with eye jokes and blind jokes, because they are not my jokes. I am merely a voyeur in another persons tragedy, I lay no claim to having the understanding of the experience necessary to allow for laughter.

Again, let me make clear. I can not approach this book outside of my personal experience. Of course in reality I do not believe you have to have experienced everything to laugh at a joke. But in terms of purposefully trying to create humour in a novel that is fundamentally tragic, for an audience that is mostly YA, I struggle with. I struggle with it because the empty platitudes that are trying so hard to be subverted in this novel, are still being created. It is still suggesting there can be lightness and humour within the terminally dark - and it is suggesting it to people who have never experienced the terminally dark.

This read like a novel where the author has truly witnessed the emptiness of teenage terminal illness, and thankfully appears to have become more considerate and thoughtful for it. As opposed to erring on the side of platitudes.
But it still read as a novel attempting to explain where the hope in hopeless situations are.

Perhaps because it is too raw a subject for me, or perhaps because the novel really is sentimental and gratuitous (granted in a different way from the norm of this genre) but this is not a book I would recommend.
For sufferers, for family members of sufferers, or for well meaning people seeking to understand the hopelessness of some situations. I would recommend it for none.