Turtles All the Way Down: My Mixed Feelings

Turtles All the Way Down was the very first John Green novel I've read, and honestly, it both surprised me and offered some confirmation bias.

This book was easy to read. By that, I mean it was not particularly challenging, and it was a pleasant read that I personally got through in just about 3-4 days. It flows very nicely, and I do admire parts of Green's writing style. I'll explain more on that in just a bit.

All in all, I'd give this book 3/5 stars. It wasn't horrible, but I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone in particular. It was "okay." It did have that typical signature of Green's, the angst-filled dysfunctional teenage couple. Being honest, the book is mostly about that relationship and the relationship of the main character (Aza Holmes) and her best friend. Aza struggles with anxiety and OCD ticks. They basically run her life and keep her in a never-ending spiral that becomes threatening to her own health. I believe that this book would be very relatable to others who struggle with these mental illnesses, and I do have to praise John Green for that ability, to describe what goes through the head of someone with Anxiety so well.

The main downfall of this book was really the overall plot, aside from a few details. It just seemed a little bit cliche to me, and the front cover, where the summary of the book is, states that there is a mystery involved. This leads you to believe that this is going to be the overarching story, but it's almost an afterthought. The main plot line is that Aza and her friend revisit an old friend of Aza's, who happens to be the 16 year old child of a missing billionaire. They visit him to offer information on his dad's disappearance for a reward, but Aza ends up flourishing with this young man, and the reward becomes an afterthought. She continues to struggle with her mental illness, but develops a loving relationship with him and eventually, the story does come back to his father's disappearance in the end. Obviously, there are many more characters, and many more specifics, but this was the most basic plot line, and it was overall, in my opinion, underwhelming and very stereotypical for a YA novel.

This is not to say the novel was horrible. I quite enjoyed Green's writing style and his usage of italics to emphasize Aza's thought spirals, almost as if she is talking to herself. The novel also has an ongoing theme of "spirals" which I thought to be very interesting and really pulled smaller aspects together. My favorite part of the novel was the last chapter. The way Green describes from Aza's perspective the concept of "moving on" really hit home for me:

"Over the next few months, I kept going. I got better without ever quite getting well...I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing...In the moonless darkness, we were just witnesses to light, and I felt a sliver of what must have driven Davis to astronomy. There was a kind of relief in having your own smallness laid bare before you, and I realized something Davis must have already known: Spirals grown indefinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow indefinitely large the farther you follow them out.

And I knew I would remember that feeling, underneath the split-up sky, back before the machinery of fate ground us into one thing or another, back when we could still be everything.

I thought, lying there, that I might love him for the rest of my life. We did love each other - maybe we never said it, and maybe love was never something we were in, but it was something I felt. I loved him, and I thought, maybe I will never see him again, and I'll be stuck missing him, and isn't that so terrible.

But it turns out to not be terrible, because I know the secret that the me lying beneath that sky could not imagine: I know that girl would go on, that she would grow up, have children and love them, that despite loving them she would get too sick to care for them, be hospitalized, get better, and then get sick again. I know a shrink would say, write it down, how you got here.

So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.

You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.

But underneath those skies, your hand - no, my hand - no, our hand - in his, you don't know yet. You don't know that the spiral painting is in that box on your dining room table, with a post-it note stuck to the back of the frame: Stole this from a lizard for you -D. You can't know yet how that painting will follow you from one apartment to another and then eventually to a house, or how decades later, you'll be so proud that Daisy continues to be your best friend, that growing into different lives only makes you more fiercely loyal to each other. You don't know that you'd go to college, find a job, make a life, see it unbuilt and rebuilt.

I, a singular proper noun, would go on, if always in a conditional tense." (Pages 281-286)

I would recommend this book to anyone struggling with anxiety, just due to the artistic way Green writes about the feeling of anxiety. It makes it very easy for anyone to understand, and the ending is quite touching.

I guess I'm not a huge John Green fan, but I would not be totally against reading another of his books if I need a pleasant read. I do admire his writing style, and although it wasn't my cup of tea, I can see how others may enjoy Turtles All the Way Down.

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