A Touch of Book Madness

This story is beautiful, deep and meaningful and it will touch you to the core of your heart. It raises issues of life and death, of sickness and health and the utter importance of love.

What is love? How long lasting it has to be to be significant? How do you live a life in sickness? These are all questions that the author tries to answer in this marvelous novel.

Much as An Imperial Affliction, this book provides a different and more real intake to kids with cancer and how we idolize their lives after they’ve passed just because they were sick. It was interesting and mind opening, because as Hazel was always concerned, people should be remembered for who they were, not what illness they “battled”. It also portrayed our need to be remembered by humanity once we are gone, our desire to do great things.

In sum, this book was heartbreaking and compelling, and it got me thinking until way after I finished it.

I loved the characters and the depth they all had. Each one of them had their own concerns. For Isaac it was his broken heart, for Augustus was posterity, and for Hazel was her being a grenade. Apprehensions that signified humanity’s greatest fears towards death.

I particularly loved the way they related, and how they helped each other overcome their toughest moments. You can experience, through them, that love and friendship can change the perspective of everything.

This was my first audio book ever, and I’m so grateful I took the risk and got it, because I opened up to a whole new and wonderful world I was missing. I’m officially an audio book lover! Anyhow, even if it was my first audio book, I didn’t need to be an expert to tell that the narration was impeccable! Kate Rudd, did an excellent job, especially with the gender roles. It’s hard for a woman to portrait good male voice, and she did it superbly not only with one, but with several characters. I particularly enjoyed that you could immediately tell who was speaking. Not one voice was like the other, and I loved how she played Peter Van Houten and Lidewij, because she did a great job capturing their accents. Finally, I will like to add, her rhythm and breathing were smooth. I will be keeping my eye out for other narrations of her.