I've never read a novel with cancer-kids as protagonists (no spoilers, cancer's mentioned on the first page) nor one where cancer is as much a character (not written as if it is, but it features, a lot) as the characters themselves, and especially not one that is so beautifully funny and tenderly truthful about teenage love and difficulties and desires and courage and depair, when cancer's always lurking in the background, along with cancer's end-game: death. 

But John Green's incrediblly truthful writing makes for an unexpected lightheartedness in the face of lurking death. Here's Hazel Grace, the 16-year-old proagonist: I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

Her courage and her humour and her truthful despair, not to mention her love affair, make The Fault in our Stars a book full of hope, despite the inevitability of her youthful death.