Abstract
This article examines Junauda Petrus’s The Stars and the Blackness Between Them (2020) – a literary debut telling the story of two black girls from different backgrounds falling in love with each other – in light of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012). After briefly introducing the subgenre of YA queer romance fiction, the article adopts a popular romance studies perspective to observe how the presence of the protagonist’s terminal illness affects the narrative construction of adolescent love. In its first part, the article specifically aims at shedding light on a discursive aspect – shared by Petrus’s and Green’s narratives – centring on a notion of existential infinitude within finitude brought about by recognition. The second part of the article discusses intertextuality as a substantial formal aspect that reveals Green’s and Petrus’s different approaches to the genre they engage with – articulated in terms of the Symbolic and the Semiotic respectively – and the way they narrate and resolve the destinies of their fictional characters.
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