Green’s signature style shines: His carefully structured dialogue and razor-sharp characters brim with genuine intellect, humor and desire. From their trip to Amsterdam to meet the reclusive Van Houten to their hilariously flirty repartee, readers will swoon on nearly every page. The two become connected at the hip, and what follows is a smartly crafted intellectual explosion of a romance. He agrees to read the Van Houten and she agrees to read his-based on his favorite bloodbath-filled video game. She’s smart, snarky and 16 she goes to community college and jokingly calls Peter Van Houten, the author of her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, her only friend besides her parents. He’s a gorgeous, confident, intelligent amputee who always loses video games because he tries to save everyone.

Sparks fly when Hazel Grace Lancaster spies Augustus “Gus” Waters checking her out across the room in a group-therapy session for teens living with cancer. She’s fighting the brown fluid in her lungs caused by tumors. He’s in remission from the osteosarcoma that took one of his legs. Readers will find a more challenging, original take on abuse, abusers and recovery in Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (2008) Readers will easily unravel the tired, central plot twist, but they may be confused when Jenna morphs abruptly, without explanation, from a teenager under surveillance-lacking cell phone, driver’s license, privacy-into a free spirit enjoying all of the above.

The framing conceit (Jenna dictates her story to a detective who has given her a digital recorder) is distancing. The one exception, a refreshingly normal classmate and potential boyfriend, is soon left behind.

Jenna’s voice is edgily authentic, but other characters seem to consist entirely of symptoms-case studies in uncontrolled violence, rape, self-mutilation, victim-grooming and sexual and substance abuse. Isolated, with a domineering, plastic-surgeon dad and alcoholic, bookstore-owner mom, Jenna’s increasingly smitten with Mitch, who goes out of his way to advocate for her and invite her into his life. Today she copes with stress by e-mailing her beloved brother, a Marine in Iraq, and by self-mutilation, which recently earned her a stint in a hospital psychiatric ward. Years earlier, Jenna was maimed in a house fire. Bearing scars both literal and figurative, Jenna Lord, 16, falls for Mitch Anderson, the married chemistry teacher who helps her survive a rocky start at a Wisconsin science magnet school.

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