You are listening to Books, Ballads, and B-roll, the podcast, with your hosts, Bee and Alastair.

In this episode, we discuss: the theme of loss in relation to the book The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green; the movie The Song of the Sea, directed by Tom Moore; and the Song The Ghost of Virginia, by Justin Townes Earle.

In John Green’s famous novel, two teenagers, Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters (aka “Gus”), meet through a cancer support group and fall in love. Their relationship is complicated by the fact that Hazel’s disease is terminal, and the characters grapple with ideas of death and oblivion and what this means for their legacy.

Our opinions on the novel:

• Bee sympathizes with Hazel and Gus but does not feel their relationship works well—she finds them to be pretentious, finds Gus to be overly direct, and finds the speed at which they fell in love unrealistic.
• Alastair somewhat disagrees, feeling that Gus and Hazel’s direct demeanor and the way they fell in love were a realistic result of the fact that they both know they have limited time, and want to make the most of it while they’re alive.
• Bee thinks Hazel’s character is somewhat flat, not noticing substantial character growth over the course of the novel.
• Alastair agrees that Hazel could have changed more as a character, but disagrees that she did not grow; she realized throughout the book that loving someone is worthwhile even if your time with them is severely limited, and goes from thinking of herself as a “grenade” that other people shouldn’t get too close to, to accepting that other people are happy with their choice to love her even though it may result in grief.

In this beautiful animated film, a young boy named Ben navigates a complex relationship with his younger sister, Saoirse, and his father who’s been distant ever since the loss of his wife. It’s kind of unclear what happened to Ben’s mother, Bronagh. She began having pains when Saoirse was about to be born and had to go out to sea to give birth. Saoirse was washed up on the shore and returned to her father safely, but Bronagh never returned. It seems like she may have died during childbirth, but there is a heart wrenching scene in the end where she comes back and says goodbye to her family once more, before returning to sea forever. As it turns out, Bronagh is a selkie and Saoirse is part selkie.

Our opinions on the movie: