"The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green

Genre: Romance, Tragedy, Life, Humor

Target Audience: Young Adult, Adult

Hazel is a teenage girl dealing with terminal cancer. Wait! Don’t scroll down or click the back button or anything drastic like that! Hazel may have cancer but this isn’t your typical cancer book. It’s more about living and growing up than death and dying. Hazel has been dealing with the idea of her terminal cancer for years. She goes through life reading and staying at home watching America’s Next Top Model. One day however, when she goes to her cancer support group (held in the Literal Heart of Jesus) she meets Augustus Waters. He’s charming and lively, an odd type of person to be in the cancer support group where people ride the elevator out and never come back. They form this awesome connection and proceed to really live again (telling you any more would be spoiler-y).

I read TFiOS this summer for my fiction summer reading book because I had read something else by the author and really liked his style. I loved this book. It was funny and heartbreaking (yes, more sad things, sorry) and beautifully written. It was a love story done right. I have said I don’t particularly like romance but this was beautiful and sweet and really atypical. TFiOS wasn’t just a love story though, it was a family story and a friend story and a life story.

5/5 stars

(The Shepaug Library owns a copy of this book. Check if it's available for checkout.)

"The Butterfly Clues" by Kate Ellison

Genre: Mystery

Target Audience: Young Adult (Girls)

The Butterfly Clues is the story of Penelope “Lo” Marin and her search for the truth about a murdered girl known only by the name of Sapphire. This mystery is not the only thing on Lo’s mind though. A year before the story begins Oren Marin, her brother, died leaving the Marin family a broken mess and Lo to battle her own inner demons. Lo hoards things, steals and has rituals she must perform before completing even the most mundane of tasks. Her social life is at a standstill and school is a chore Lo goes through in a daze. Sapphire’s death leads Lo to a shadow world coexisting with her quiet, “normal” life in Cleveland, Ohio. This community of runaways, criminals and other outsiders is called Neverland. Her guide through Neverland is a mysterious street artist called Flynt. As the story unfolds you realize that the people Lo meets are more deeply intertwined in the mystery than they at first appear.

I liked this book although I must say that it is not a happy, feel good tale so if that is what you are looking for in a book at this moment, I’d leave it for a later time. There is a romance subplot which, if that’s your cup of tea, might be a bright spot in the gloom. The story delivers you straight into Lo’s head which is filled with self doubt, guilt and shame. The Butterfly Clues is just as much about Lo’s struggle for control of her life as it is about the mystery of who killed Sapphire.  These themes and the general tone actually reminded me of Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, another good but thoroughly sad book.

4/5 stars