A few years ago, I declared a book the most entertaining I had read about suicide.  Today, I give you the funniest book I’ve read about cancer.

Don’t get me wrong, John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars” is incredibly sad in some parts, but the main character, a teenage girl named Hazel, peppers in phrases and observations that cut beautifully through the cloud of seriousness and sadness that linger in her world.

At one point she is talking about how she has a scan coming up to see the progress of her cancer, but says she has nothing to gain by worrying about what it might find before it actually happens.

“And yet still I worried.  I liked being a person.  I wanted to keep at it.  Worry is yet another side effect of dying.”

Part of the story involves her favorite book, called An Imperial Affliction, which is also told by a girl with cancer and which abruptly ends.  Like most of us when we finish a book, she wants to know what happens later to everyone involved, including the girl’s hamster.

She shares the book with her boyfriend, a fellow teen cancer patient, which leads to him saying something that made me laugh probably more than most people.

“‘I have been wanting to call you on a nearly minutely basis, but I have been waiting until I could form a coherent thought in re An Imperial Afflicion.'” (He said ‘in re.’  He really did.  That boy.)”

Why is that extra funny to me?  Because I have a friend who says, out loud, “re” in conversation.  It goes something like, “Oh hey, re what you emailed me about this morning…”  It is never not entertaining.

There’s a part later where her team of doctors is meeting to talk about the direction of her care.  The main doctor asks how they should proceed.

“And then she just looked at me, like she was waiting for an answer. ‘Um,’ I said, ‘I feel like I am not the most qualified person in the room to answer that question?'”

Out of the heavy, Hazel brings the levity.  But again, there is a lot that speaks to how we process people with cancer, especially when it comes to kids.  One of the things Hazel is very concerned about is not being seen as A KID WITH CANCER.  She does not want that to define her.

At one point, she is looking at the Facebook-like profile of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, who died from cancer.  The girl’s wall is filled with posts you absolutely would expect, saying how much she’ll be missed and how heroically she fought.

“She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.”

Her boyfriend, Augustus, was a star basketball player before cancer took one of his legs.  He became less of a fan of basketball, and after a comment about how in heaven he could play as much as he wanted, Hazel imagined his reaction.

“If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing basketballs?  Who makes the basketballs in question?  Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play?”

A great question.  And a really exceptional book.  Also, soon a movie: