Turtles All the Way Down Paperback – June 11, 2019

John Green is a talented writer with the ability to put together a gripping story and well-drawn characters. Turtles All the Way Down emphasizes the theme of mental illness, and interviews with Green have focused on how the obsessive compulsive disorder of the main character, Aza, reflects his own OCD. But the novel is as much about the loss of a parent and about how great wealth alters one's life and makes it difficult to assess the motives of other people who are friendly. It is Davis Pickett who lives in great wealth, but his father Russell has gone missing. Aza goes to the same school as Davis, and she used to have a crush on him. Her best friend Daisy wants to set them up together. Things quickly get complicated.Of course, there is romance, and while 16 year old Aza wants to kiss Davis, she can't stop thinking about the impact the exchange of saliva will have on her body and it alarms her so much that she can't bear it. She gets very self-involved and has to see her psychiatrist regularly, and she has learned various techniques to get her emotions under control. She has also been prescribed medication, which she rarely takes. She lives with her mother, who teaches at her school, and they have a good relationship, but Aza often withholds a lot of information from her. It makes it more difficult for her mother to help her. During the novel, Aza's problems get more serious and her behavior becomes especially bizarre. But there were times when she was more able to cope with her feelings and she hopes to return to such a state in the future.Aza has a strong relationship with Daisy and they often hang out together a lot. Daisy is far more outgoing than Aza and talks a lot, but there are tensions in the friendship. Aza is mostly focused on her own problems and pays little attention to Daisy's life. Eventually, in a crucial scene, Daisy voices her resentment of Aza's self-obsession. Aza's mental struggles mean that she has little energy to follow the lives of her friends in a real way, and Daisy questions whether they have a real friendship. It's a difficult and important question. It gets resolved, to an extent, with the idea that despite her limitations, Aza still has a lot to offer in a friendship.What's strong about Turtles All the Way Down is not the description of the mental illness itself, which is pretty standard, although it does do a good job of making sense of strange thoughts and actions, and how Aza manages to undermine her own goals. The strength is more in the way that Green shows the impact of Aza's mental illness on her relationships -- with her mother, friend and boyfriend, and even with herself. There's a similar inspection of the effect of great wealth and an unloving father on the lives of Davis and his younger brother. While the material benefits of money are very clear, Green is good at showing that it can make friendship much more difficult. Aza's mother is very suspicious of Davis, expecting that he will just want to exploit her daughter, and she is wrong about that. Aza is much more ready to take Davis at face value, but the money causes plenty of problems. It is probably rarer for YA novels to inspect the problems that come with wealth than it is for them to address mental illness, so it is this theme that makes Turtles All the Way Down more unusual. I strongly recommend this book.

Turtles All the Way Down is powerful and simple all at the same time. It is about Aza, a teenager struggling with mental illness, her best friend Daisy, and her past friend Davis. Davis’s father disappears, running from persecution of crimes he committed while earning his millions of dollars. Daisy and Aza jump into the mystery, hoping to receive the one hundred thousand dollar reward. The book is in the young adult genre.Turtles All the Way Down is romantic. It is comical. It is motivational. It is devastating. It is a mystery. But most of all, it is a story about friendship. Daisy and Aza have always been friends, but not the best communicators. Despite everything, they come out stronger than before. Even when everyone else cannot get to Aza and she loses people and things she loves, Daisy is there. They are character foils of each other. Daisy is loud, rambunctious, and confident. Aza is worrisome, calm, and quiet. They balance each other just like Enkidu and Gilgamesh in the classic story Gilgamesh.John Green explores the idea of mental health and its effect on many people in a friend group. Aza’s mom worries about her daughter. Daisy periodically gets annoyed with her friend’s “selfish behavior”. Davis accepts Aza as she is but has worries that she does not fancy him. Aza resents herself and believes that everyone thinks she is crazy. In the end, John Green finds a way to present the reader with this idea: it is okay not to be okay. He also adds, “your now is not your forever,” showing the reader that their situation is not permanent and will get better.Overall, Turtles all the Way Down is about life’s abstract ideas. It is about describing the indescribable. John Green supplies the reader with devastation, love, and friendship. It takes the reader on a rollercoaster of emotions. I recommend this book to any young adult who has a mental illness or would like to learn more about them.