Dying girl meets hot boy. Hot boy and dying girl fall in teenage love and go on adventures to Amsterdam together. Dying girl is disappointed by her meeting with a certain author whom she idolizes. Dying girl and hot boy admit their love to each other and have physical relations. In a horrible twist of fate, dying girl lives while hot boy dies. The end.
Confused and a little intrigued? Don't worry about it—we'll go a little slower (and add a little detail) to make the summary just a bit more palatable and easy to follow.
We open up the story with Hazel Grace, who is your average teenager except for the little fact that she's got all sorts of cancer inside her body and her lungs aren't working very well.
Hazel is in Support Group one day when a new boy catches her eye. Well, to be accurate, they catch one another's eyes. Soon enough, she and Augustus (aforementioned hot boy) are flirtatious friends and talk to each other about everything. Hazel shares her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, with Augustus, and together they obsess about the unsolved ending. Augustus manages to somehow get through to the author and when Hazel emails him, he invites her to come to Amsterdam to discuss the ending of the book. A fan's dream come true.
In the meantime, Augustus and Hazel's good friend Isaac is losing his eye (the only one he has left) so that he can be cancer-free at long last. In the process though, he also loses his girlfriend Monica, who can't "deal" with having a blind boyfriend. Yeah, we think she's a little superficial too, but whatever.
So Augustus surprises Hazel by telling her that he still has his wish (the "Wish" that they grant to dying children) from when he had cancer and lost his leg, and he'd happily use it to take her to Amsterdam to meet Peter Van Houten, reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction. Ah, true romance. Hazel of course, is over the moon about the whole idea, but first she has to convince her hovering, worried parents...