The Fault in Our Stars

Written by: John Green

First line: Late in the winter of my seventeenth 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.

Why you should read this book: This provocative, heart-wrenching novel features a cast of teenagers afflicted in various ways by cancer, but it is most adamantly not a cancer book. From page one, the savvy reader recognizes that there will be death, but it's not a book about dying; rather it is a book about living, and the events that help us understand how precious and powerful and full of potential it is to be alive. Hazel has been compressed and confined by her disease, until she meets Augustus, who shows her how large and packed with possibility the world is, no matter how long you have in it.