John Green and The Fault in Our Stars Manuscript
I can’t think of a more perfect way to start the morning other than hearing the news about John Green’s newest book which is now entitled The Fault in Our Stars. After watching John Green’s 1 hour and a half(that’s dedication for you) youtube video in which he read the first chapter of the book, here are some interesting bits of information I’ve gathered:
- Every pre-ordered copy of the book will be signed by John Green. You can pre-order your copy here.
- The book is called The Fault in Our Stars after the great line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that goes “The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
- There is no definite release date yet but the book is going be released on either March or April of 2012.
- It is currently 272 pages long but it will be trimmed to a number of pages that is a multiple of 8. (John Green said that books are all published on multiples of 8. I don’t know why.)
- It’s dedicated to Esther but it’s not about Esther. The Fault in Our Stars is a fictional novel.
- It is the Yeti’s(Sarah, his wife) favorite book from him.
- No Unicorns, Storm Troopers or Zombies. Dammit!
- There’s cursing but there’s no “awkward blowjobs” or “aggressively unerotic oral sex”.
- It’s not the desert island book.
- There’s no cover yet but you can check out this tumblr site that features a collection of fan-made cover design for the forthcoming book.
- It will be available on Kindle. “Although obviously that copy won’t be signed because I can’t get inside your kindle to sign your book.”
- Before reading the first chapter, John Green read the first part of T.S. Elliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The quote represents as to what the book is to him.
These are the basic information from the chapter he read:
- First Sentence: In the winter of my 16th year, my mother decided I was depressed presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
- Our narrator is a girl named Hazel Grace Lancaster, 16 years old and diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She is John Green’s first girl narrator.
- The other main character is Augustus Waters who has osteosarcoma and will probably the subject of many nerdfighter girls’ fantasies in the future.
- Basing from the infamous John Green formula, I am assuming the quirky sidekick character is Isaac. “A long-faced skinny kid with straight blond hair that swept over one of his eyes. His eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer.”
- Our characters, as you can guess, are part of a support group for kids with cancer.
- Hazel Grace religiously follows America’s Next Top Model.
You can watch the entire video by clicking on this link. If you want to watch only the first chapter reading, it starts from mark 0:38:00 to mark 1:03:00.
The Fault in Our Stars is a book about illness and death. There are tons of books that has been published about those topics recently but basing from the first chapter, it still has the same quirky humor that all of John Green’s previous books have. I guess that’s what makes this book different from all the other “dying teenager” books. I don’t know. I haven’t read that many books with this kind of theme.
You have no idea how excited I am for the release this book. I am running out of John Green books to read and the only books from him I haven’t read yet are his collaboration novel and his short stories from some short stories collection book. We badly need a new John Green book, you guys! The probability of 2012 being an Awesome year is getting bigger and bigger.
As always, dftba.
