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 devour this romantic, Faustian fable.Ī dark fantasy brimming with passion and peril. The slowly revealed lore of the demons coupled with Dee’s adventures make for a whirlwind of a page-turner. Dee’s never felt more alive-yet never been possibly so dead. As the danger ratchets up, so do her feelings for another member of the troop. She and the other heartless work to close the voids that periodically open all around the world to keep the monsters that issue forth from overrunning the planet. As a new member of Portland’s “troop of heartless,” Dee follows her demon’s biddings directly into battle with other, truly horrifying monsters. She trades a two-year lease on her heart for tuition money.

When Dee’s scholarship is suddenly revoked, she finds herself back in the market for fairy tales she refuses to go back home.

The demons emerged in order to make deals-humans can trade body parts (their own) for a wish. A tough home life has wrung any belief in fairy tales out of her even though demons announced themselves as real to the public via press conference when she was only a child. Mixed-race white/Latina high school student Dee Moreno (she has her father’s light brown skin and textured hair) attends a prestigious boarding school in Portland, Oregon, keeping necessary distance from her alcoholic, abusive parents. A girl sells her heart to a demon to escape abusive parents, unwittingly signing up for more than she bargained for.

The hearts we sold