[[TW childhood cancer]]

The Fault in our Stars fucked me up. I wish I hadn’t read it. I spend my teenage years as a sibling of a terminal cancer patient and later went through cancer treatment myself. We had a group of friend families through pediatric oncology, who were the only people in the world who understood what it was like. The book gets a lot of things wrong, but it paints the picture accurately enough to have given a post-traumatic anxiety attack. Overall, I found the book extremely disrespectful to what terminal kids go through. Not in the way it portrayed the subject matter so much as they fact that it portrayed it at all in a young adult ‘chicken soup for the soul’ kind of way. It had all the details but downplayed the important parts in order to push through some half-baked Romeo and Juliet plot line.