From Five Feet Apart, a romance novel featuring teens with cystic fibrosis, to Everything, Everything, Nicola Yoon’s best seller about a lovestruck girl suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, to Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a critics’ darling with a plot summarized by its title, both Hollywood and the young-adult publishing industry have been awash in these stories ever since TFIOS’ debut, and audiences have responded in droves at the bookstore and the box office.Īt the beginning of 2012, Woodley was still starring on The Secret Life of the American Teenager but beginning to emerge as a legitimate talent thanks to a Golden Globe–nominated performance in 2011’s The Descendants. The enormous success of Green’s book led to a renewed interest in the genre. But most of those works came out decades earlier. It wasn’t the first book to portray high-schoolers dealing with illness while pursuing love (see A Time to Die, Too Young to Die, even the Judy Blume scoliosis classic Deenie).
The Rise of the “Sick Teens in Love” GenreĪs you may recall, The Fault in Our Stars tells the story of Hazel and Gus, two high-schoolers with cancer who embark on a star-crossed romance. In celebration of the book’s tenth anniversary, here are the biggest effects that TFIOS has had on our lives a decade out. Yet thanks to some clever marketing and stellar reviews, a hit it became, and the world hasn’t been the same since. TFIOS wasn’t a guaranteed hit - far from it. Of course a YA romance about star-crossed teens would do well! Of course the endlessly quotable, social-media-savvy John Green would become a celebrity! Of course Hollywood would green-light a movie based on the book three weeks after its debut! But back at the start of 2012, the “sick teen” genre barely existed, Green was just a decently popular author known best for his vlogs, and theaters were filled with movies about supernatural kids, not super-unlucky ones. Within the year, there’d be special editions, nearly a million copies printed, and the announcement of a highly anticipated movie adaptation, not to mention a fan base of readers larger and more passionate than the book world had seen since perhaps Twilight.Ī decade after its release, the success of TFIOS seems obvious.
1 on the New York Times best-seller list, where it would stay for months.
The sixth book from John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, debuted January 10 at No. January, 2012: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol reigned at the box office, a new show called Girls premiered on HBO, Lana Del Rey told us we were Born to Die … and a young-adult novel about two kids with cancer falling in love became a massive sensation.