Monday Book Recs--John Green's The Fault In Our Stars and Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

This is a story of a teen girl who has terminal cancer. It's killing her, making her lungs fill up with fluid, but she's on a medication that seems to allow her to keep living. The medicine isn't going to cure Hazel. It's just slowing down the progress of the disease. She has already finished her GED back when she thought she was going to die soon. Now she is working through some college courses, but has a kind of liminal life, a space between high school and college, where only a teen who doesn't expect to live to grow up can go. She has to deal with parents who are terrified of her dying, and friends who have pulled away from her so they don't have to live with more loss. She spends time in a group of cancer survivors, but she doesn't really fit in there, either.

Until she meets August, a boy who has gone into remission and is ready to show her how to use her "Wish" to proper effect. Hazel used hers up at 13 to go to Disney World, a fact which embarrasses her. But August has saved his and he takes her to Amsterdam to meet her favorite author, who turns out to be a jerk. I loved the meta-fiction there of an author writing about how authors can be jerks. Because like regular people, authors have good days and bad days and unlike regular people, most authors are kind of neurotic and some of us are really crazy. Most of all, I loved what felt like real meditations on life and love through the eyes of a teen who won't live long, like the following:

"The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again."

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

This is a novel about two teen girls who live during WWII and work in various capacities for the British. One is a pilot and one is an undercover agent, but for a long time, you are not sure which is which, for good reasons since one has been captured by the Nazis in France and is being held prisoner and being tortured.

I am a huge WWII fanatic and obsessed with Nazis, so I knew this book was going to interest me. I also think Elizabeth Wein is a fabulous writer who deserves to have a huge following. She is so SMART and her research is always impeccable. But the real winner here is the relationship between the two friends. So many YA books these days are all about the romance. And hey, I love me some romance. But not every book has to be about finding love because it makes it feel like that's all that matters for girls--and it isn't. A good friendship is sometimes the most important thing that comes out of the teen years. And under the pressure cooker of war, the friendship is going to be even better--or even worse.

I loved that the girls in this book are not doing make work. There is no need to pretend that the girls were allowed to do the same things that the men were. There is a bit of grousing about that. And then the two go on about their lives, doing what's important in what their real choices are. No need to make things either better or worse for women in the time period. I am all for feminism, but I hate it when we pretend that just because women didn't have the same choices that they have now, they therefore had no choices of consequence. Smart women always find ways to have choices.

It's hard to talk about the book too much without giving it away, I realize. But I will say that beyond the friendship in this book, I loved how carefully drawn each of the minor characters was. Not a single throwaway character. Hats off for that. The "evil" Nazi commander has a daughter he loves. The guy who may betray them all is even-handedly described with good and bad. And the horror of war is thus made even more horrible--as it truly is.