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Turtles All the Way Down
The critically acclaimed, instant #1 bestseller by John Green, author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and The Fault in Our Stars
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“A tender story about learning to cope when the world feels out of control.” —People
“A sometimes heartbreaking, always illuminating, glimpse into how it feels to live with mental illness.” –NPR
John Green, the award-winning, international bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed, returns with a story of shattering, unflinching clarity in this brilliant novel of love, resilience, and the power of lifelong friendship.
Aza Holmes never intended to pursue the disappearance 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 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.
NOW STREAMING ON MAX!
“A tender story about learning to cope when the world feels out of control.” —People
“A sometimes heartbreaking, always illuminating, glimpse into how it feels to live with mental illness.” –NPR
John Green, the award-winning, international bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed, returns with a story of shattering, unflinching clarity in this brilliant novel of love, resilience, and the power of lifelong friendship.
Aza Holmes never intended to pursue the disappearance 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 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.
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Readers say *Turtles All the Way Down* beautifully captures the intense, often overwhelming experience of living with anxiety and OCD through the rela...
No Turtles in a Book Allegedly About Turtles
This book sucked so much to get through. I was about 90% through when I expressed to my partner that is was fucking terrible, and he asked what the premise was. I realized I couldn’t even identify a premise or plot. What started out as a search for a missing person (thank you to another reviewer for pointing out that this seems to be a theme in EVERY JOHN GREEN BOOK) became less a subject of interest as it went on and on.
As the book went on, there were more lackluster attempts to include quotable lines about the meaning of life, and the more I was convinced that Green truly doesn’t know anything about the meaning of life. He knows about waxing poetic, poorly. His conclusions, though, seem to be about life being ultimately meaningless and terrible. While it ends with some maxims about the importance of love, they rang hollow against how awful the story, if you could call it one, was.
SPOILERS
The relationships in this book are disappointing to say the least. Daisy treats Aza like shit. Davis is actually kind and appreciative of her. Guess who gets to stay in her life indefinitely? The “best friend” who is constantly complaining about how hard it is to remain friends.
Aza finds out that Daisy has been writing a minor character in Star Wars fanfiction based on her being awful. It’s not just one story, either. It’s been a recurring trope in this fanfic for YEARS. They have a fight while Aza is driving, and they get into an accident because she’s distracted by the fight. Later on, they just apologize to each other and Aza admits she is hard to deal with and doesn’t try hard enough to know Daisy. Weak boundaries and conflict avoidance is all it is.
As for Davis, I was rooting for him and Aza to stay together, but not only do they never officially get to be together, they create distance from each other for no good reason. Davis likes Aza for who she is, but she can’t promise that she’ll ever get better, so they stop seeing each other. Davis is stuck in a parentified relationship with his little brother, alone to grieve both parents.
That’s it. That’s the whole story.
The OCD
Look, the whole reason I decided to try another John Green novel (I’ve also read Paper Towns and The Fault in Our Stars), is because I was diagnosed with OCD a couple of years ago and I’ve benefited from reading about it. I hoped that, since Green has revealed that he also struggles with OCD, it would be more relatable than his other works. I was disappointed in this department, too.
There’s a lot of stigma against mental health treatment in this book. I kept hoping that there would be some kind of explanation at some point, but no. Aza spends a lot of time theorizing that if psychiatric medication changes your brain, it fundamentally changes who you are. Her doctor, and the book, never directly confront this concern. A lot of people are living under this misconception about seeking psychiatric help, and the least Green could do for people who struggle with it – himself included! – is help combat rampant anti-med stigma.
Instead, Aza spirals to a point where she eventually gets caught drinking hand sanitizer in an attempt to kill bacteria inside her body. The only answer offered for copious amounts of anti-med theorizing is the stern talking-to she gets from her doctor afterward. The answer must be medication, she explains, since she spiraled because she wasn’t taking her medication. Then she says they’ll try a different med! I cannot fully convey my disgust at how shitty this is. This is not how anything works in the world of getting medicated. If someone is not taking their medication, it can’t be ruled out as not working. Also, in proper treatment, talk therapy and psychiatric prescription would be handled by two different providers. Combining them seems to be a lazy writing choice.
Furthermore, Aza’s doctor does not understand how to validate her feelings and concerns without confirming her fears. This is pretty basic, and makes me think that not only was there very little research put into this book, but maybe Green himself has had poor experiences with getting his OCD treated. This makes me really sad for him.
As for the OCD symptoms themselves, Green feeds into a lot of other stigmatizing myths about OCD. Aza is obsessed with cleanliness to such an extreme that she often gets lost in thought about bacterial behavior. She’s constantly reopening a cut and sanitizing it to make sure it’s not getting infected, for literally years on end, but this is also never addressed. For the record, hand sanitizer is not good for cuts because it kills too many of the cells that would help it heal.
In the end, Green has written a book that only serves to further stigmatize OCD. It’s written in a way that completely distances the sufferer from reality, making her do something as completely and obviously counter to logic as to get addicted to drinking hand sanitizer. I’m not saying that we don’t behave in illogical ways. This telling just doesn’t help anyone better understand OCD, whether it’s themselves or someone else dealing with it. It otherizes it.
For a better book about a teenager with OCD, I recommend Ariel Crashes a Train. It’s much better and way more fun and includes more diverse characters.
Turtles and Tuataras
There is only one conversation about the title, “Turtles All the Way Down.” Daisy tells Aza the story that’s been popularized for decades now, and Aza has a revelation about it, but it’s very contrived. There’s no further discussion about it. Green concludes with increasingly flowery wording that there’s no such thing as an answer, just more questions. Which is fair enough, but it was poorly done.
More discussion goes to the tuatara, a not-lizard from New Zealand who is the sole beneficiary of the missing billionaire’s estate. Everyone agrees that it’s fucked up to leave his wealth to the tuatara instead of giving at least some to his own children. The point is made repeatedly that money corrupts, and it seems like Green is trying to confess to his own misery as someone worth $17 million.
Also, s*icide is a very serious subject but it would’ve made so much more sense if the billionaire’s body was found to have been self-unalived instead of just him going into a sewer and realizing he didn’t have sufficient supplies or whatever. It was pretty unclear, but the “really bad smell” was visceral enough to not save the reader any trouble.
In conclusion, I really wish John Green would stop writing fiction about young people. He’s not a teenage girl, and he certainly doesn’t have any right to be writing from the perspective of them. Reading between the lines, I think he’s trying to confess that he’s actually a very miserable person. He’s rich from being a mediocre writer, he misses being a teenager for some reason, he’s always missing people and answers he can’t find, and his OCD latches onto endlessly trying to find and create quotable quotes. More than any of his characters in this tragic book, I put it down feeling pity for him.
This book sucked so much to get through. I was about 90% through when I expressed to my partner that is was fucking terrible, and he asked what the premise was. I realized I couldn’t even identify a premise or plot. What started out as a search for a missing person (thank you to another reviewer for pointing out that this seems to be a theme in EVERY JOHN GREEN BOOK) became less a subject of interest as it went on and on.
As the book went on, there were more lackluster attempts to include quotable lines about the meaning of life, and the more I was convinced that Green truly doesn’t know anything about the meaning of life. He knows about waxing poetic, poorly. His conclusions, though, seem to be about life being ultimately meaningless and terrible. While it ends with some maxims about the importance of love, they rang hollow against how awful the story, if you could call it one, was.
SPOILERS
The relationships in this book are disappointing to say the least. Daisy treats Aza like shit. Davis is actually kind and appreciative of her. Guess who gets to stay in her life indefinitely? The “best friend” who is constantly complaining about how hard it is to remain friends.
Aza finds out that Daisy has been writing a minor character in Star Wars fanfiction based on her being awful. It’s not just one story, either. It’s been a recurring trope in this fanfic for YEARS. They have a fight while Aza is driving, and they get into an accident because she’s distracted by the fight. Later on, they just apologize to each other and Aza admits she is hard to deal with and doesn’t try hard enough to know Daisy. Weak boundaries and conflict avoidance is all it is.
As for Davis, I was rooting for him and Aza to stay together, but not only do they never officially get to be together, they create distance from each other for no good reason. Davis likes Aza for who she is, but she can’t promise that she’ll ever get better, so they stop seeing each other. Davis is stuck in a parentified relationship with his little brother, alone to grieve both parents.
That’s it. That’s the whole story.
The OCD
Look, the whole reason I decided to try another John Green novel (I’ve also read Paper Towns and The Fault in Our Stars), is because I was diagnosed with OCD a couple of years ago and I’ve benefited from reading about it. I hoped that, since Green has revealed that he also struggles with OCD, it would be more relatable than his other works. I was disappointed in this department, too.
There’s a lot of stigma against mental health treatment in this book. I kept hoping that there would be some kind of explanation at some point, but no. Aza spends a lot of time theorizing that if psychiatric medication changes your brain, it fundamentally changes who you are. Her doctor, and the book, never directly confront this concern. A lot of people are living under this misconception about seeking psychiatric help, and the least Green could do for people who struggle with it – himself included! – is help combat rampant anti-med stigma.
Instead, Aza spirals to a point where she eventually gets caught drinking hand sanitizer in an attempt to kill bacteria inside her body. The only answer offered for copious amounts of anti-med theorizing is the stern talking-to she gets from her doctor afterward. The answer must be medication, she explains, since she spiraled because she wasn’t taking her medication. Then she says they’ll try a different med! I cannot fully convey my disgust at how shitty this is. This is not how anything works in the world of getting medicated. If someone is not taking their medication, it can’t be ruled out as not working. Also, in proper treatment, talk therapy and psychiatric prescription would be handled by two different providers. Combining them seems to be a lazy writing choice.
Furthermore, Aza’s doctor does not understand how to validate her feelings and concerns without confirming her fears. This is pretty basic, and makes me think that not only was there very little research put into this book, but maybe Green himself has had poor experiences with getting his OCD treated. This makes me really sad for him.
As for the OCD symptoms themselves, Green feeds into a lot of other stigmatizing myths about OCD. Aza is obsessed with cleanliness to such an extreme that she often gets lost in thought about bacterial behavior. She’s constantly reopening a cut and sanitizing it to make sure it’s not getting infected, for literally years on end, but this is also never addressed. For the record, hand sanitizer is not good for cuts because it kills too many of the cells that would help it heal.
In the end, Green has written a book that only serves to further stigmatize OCD. It’s written in a way that completely distances the sufferer from reality, making her do something as completely and obviously counter to logic as to get addicted to drinking hand sanitizer. I’m not saying that we don’t behave in illogical ways. This telling just doesn’t help anyone better understand OCD, whether it’s themselves or someone else dealing with it. It otherizes it.
For a better book about a teenager with OCD, I recommend Ariel Crashes a Train. It’s much better and way more fun and includes more diverse characters.
Turtles and Tuataras
There is only one conversation about the title, “Turtles All the Way Down.” Daisy tells Aza the story that’s been popularized for decades now, and Aza has a revelation about it, but it’s very contrived. There’s no further discussion about it. Green concludes with increasingly flowery wording that there’s no such thing as an answer, just more questions. Which is fair enough, but it was poorly done.
More discussion goes to the tuatara, a not-lizard from New Zealand who is the sole beneficiary of the missing billionaire’s estate. Everyone agrees that it’s fucked up to leave his wealth to the tuatara instead of giving at least some to his own children. The point is made repeatedly that money corrupts, and it seems like Green is trying to confess to his own misery as someone worth $17 million.
Also, s*icide is a very serious subject but it would’ve made so much more sense if the billionaire’s body was found to have been self-unalived instead of just him going into a sewer and realizing he didn’t have sufficient supplies or whatever. It was pretty unclear, but the “really bad smell” was visceral enough to not save the reader any trouble.
In conclusion, I really wish John Green would stop writing fiction about young people. He’s not a teenage girl, and he certainly doesn’t have any right to be writing from the perspective of them. Reading between the lines, I think he’s trying to confess that he’s actually a very miserable person. He’s rich from being a mediocre writer, he misses being a teenager for some reason, he’s always missing people and answers he can’t find, and his OCD latches onto endlessly trying to find and create quotable quotes. More than any of his characters in this tragic book, I put it down feeling pity for him.
Once again John Green has created unique characters with unique circumstances. And while I didn’t enjoy this novel as much as his more well-known books, this one still made me smile and feel sad. So, for me, it’s a success if it makes me feel something. Plus, there were all those lovely quotes by others that he included, and some new ones to remember by the author, as well.
I was under the impression that the main characters were detectives on this missing billionaire case but a fourth of the way through the story they kind of stopped? That whole subplot kind of felt out of place to me. However, this devoted more focus to Aza's anxiety and compulsions which I really enjoyed reading about, so I'm not too pressed about it. The combination of the relatability of Aza's character and the nostalgia I felt reading John Green's unique writing style had me in my feels in the best way.
Loved this book! Describes anxiety well. I liked that there was a mini-mystery intwined in the book but i twas mainly about grappling with one's own self. Really well written.
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