A Book Review: Turtles All the Way Down, by John Green

Turtles All the Way Down, by John Green

4.5 Stars 

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BLURB

Sixteen-year-old Aza never intended to pursue the mystery of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward at stake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate. So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them from Russell Pickett’s son, Davis.

Aza is trying. She is trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, and maybe even a good detective, while also living within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts.

In his long-awaited return, John Green, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, shares Aza’s story with shattering, unflinching clarity in this brilliant novel of love, resilience, and the power of lifelong friendship.

FIND IT ON…

Goodreads | Amazon

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REVIEW

Turtles All the Way Down was one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year. The novel is super character-driven. John Green really delves into the mind of a person with OCD (Aza), and his description of her mind is both fascinating and borderline hypnotic.

The plot of the novel moves slowly… but I hesitate to say that there is a plot at all. The blurb of the novel hints at a mystery that was stale at best. The disappearance of Pickett serves as more of a plot device; It is given the spotlight at the first half of the book but its significance slowly fades as the story progresses. Thinking about it now, the decreasing significance that the plot has in the novel is sort of a reflection of Aza’s deteriorating mental health. The novel very much becomes withdrawn, shrunken to just the headspace and thoughts of Aza where the tangible, physical, real world in which the plot holds significance and Aza exists is completely neglected. In essence, the reader is following Aza into the spiral, deep down into her headspace. Green so skilfully achieves this effect. The downward spiral is even communicated in the formatting, with the absence of punctuation and disordered formatting.

“It’s the only way that’s stupid if it worked alcoholics would be the healthiest people in the world you’re just going to sanitize your hands and your mouth please fucking think about something else stand up I HATE BEING STUCK INSIDE YOU…”

The most striking thing is that Aza realises how trapped she is within her thoughts. She’s presented as an unwilling prisoner, which really makes me consider the degree of utter hopelessness and helplessness that suffuses the words on the pages of some parts of the book.

In this sense, I thought that the external plot with the mystery and all only served to enhance Green’s characterisation of Aza. The internal plot – or the spiralling – was really well done. Aza adequately sums up what I think Green’s storytelling should receive:

“tons of kudos”

(Although it has been taken quite out of context…)

One thing that really tore at my heart is how Aza engages in a lot of self-hate. I really hated it was actually Daisy – her supposed best friend – who perpetrated a lot of this hate and how Aza seems to forgive her all the time. Their relationship irked me. In the most irritable way possible. Daisy complains a lot about the lack of attention that Aza gives her. When I first read this, I thought: fair. However, Daisy remains continually bitter about this, which really gripes me because I feel that Daisy never took the initiative to really understand and empathise with Aza’s OCD. After she reaches her deepest point on the spiral with the sanitizer (though theoretically, not the actual deepest since the spiral is never-ending), Daisy ‘forgives’ her… and then that’s that. There was a feeble attempt by Daisy near the end, when Green divulges the meaning of the title, but I was quite dissatisfied with the way this relationship was dealt with in the novel.

A facet of the novel I do want to comment on is the general philosophy behind this book. This novel contains, very obviously, reflections of Green’s philosophy. His philosophy emanates through Aza, through Aza’s mum, through many elements of the novel, and through the way he dealt with the endings of the various relationships in this novel. The ending I want to highlight is the one that belongs to Aza and Davis’ relationship ( A/N: I did like how Green dealt with this relationship).

“You stare up at the same sky together, and after a while he says, I have to go, and you say, Good-bye, and he says, Good-bye, Aza, and no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.”

That’s the last line of the novel. It seems to mark Aza’s upward journey from that deep point in the spiral. It’s just so liberating, so hopeful – a tearfully optimistic worldview that really helped to tie the entire novel together.