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Romance
Butcher & Blackbird
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Hazel Grace Lancaster is sixteen, terminally ill, and deeply, defensively funny about it, which is exactly the tone that makes The Fault in Our Stars land as a genuine romance rather than an issue book about teenage cancer. She meets Augustus Waters at a support group neither of them particularly wants to be at, and John Green builds their relationship on sharp banter and shared existential curiosity rather than sentimentality, right up until the sentimentality becomes unavoidable and, somehow, still earned.
The scoring:
Kate Rudd won the 2013 Audie and Odyssey Awards for this recording, and it is genuinely one of the audiobook format's most acclaimed young adult performances. AudioFile magazine specifically credited Rudd with delivering every "or whatever" and precocious teenage aside with exactly right inflection, and with physically conveying Hazel's labored breathing through vocal pacing during her more difficult scenes, a technical detail that several long-time listeners cite as the single element that makes the audiobook the definitive way to experience this book, rather than merely a convenient alternative to print. John Green narrates a brief author's note segment himself, and Laura Grafton takes a small supporting role, but the vast majority of the runtime belongs to Rudd, and her performance is the reason this title is included in Audible's curated list of all-time essential listens.
Who this is for: readers who want young adult romance that treats teenagers as intellectually serious people confronting mortality honestly, without either sanitizing illness or wallowing in it.
Who this is not for: listeners who are currently grieving a loss to terminal illness, or who prefer their romance without the possibility of genuinely devastating emotional stakes; this book does not soften its ending.
It is marketed and generally read as young adult fiction, though its themes of terminal illness and mortality are handled with unusual directness, and some readers recommend it more for older teens.
Yes, she won both the 2013 Audie Award and the Odyssey Award for her narration of The Fault in Our Stars, and has received ten AudioFile Earphones Awards across her broader career.
Yes, a 2014 film adaptation starred Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort as Hazel and Augustus.
Written by John Green. Narrated by Kate Rudd. Browse more Romance audiobooks and ebooks.
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