Turtles All the Way Down Review by Emma

Over winter break, I read Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, a 2017 novel written from the point of view of a teenage girl named Aza struggling with severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. The book begins with Aza’s friend, Daisy, discovering a news article about a local millionare, Russel Pickett, who had recently gone missing after being accused of tax fraud and bribery. This piques the girls’ interest (Daisy’s in particular), both because a cash reward is offered to anyone who finds him, and because Aza knew Pickett’s son, Davis, when they were younger. The two try to look into the case, and Aza becomes reaccquainted with Davis. They soon begin a relationship, but Aza is anxious about how to interact with Davis, and struggles to act normal when she and Davis make physical contact or kiss, since this triggers her anxieties about receiving bacterial diseases. Still, the two continue their relationship fairly normally, despite Aza’s misgivings about the case of Davis’s father and worries about his younger brother’s reaction to it, her worsening “thought spirals,” and her deteriorating friendship with Daisy. Throughout the book, we get a peek into Aza’s mind as she struggles to live normally with her mental condition while grappling with her own sense of identity and tries to fight against her own mind.

I thought there were a lot of things that Turtles All the Way Down did really well, but the thing that stood out the most to me was the way Green portrayed mental illness. One important point that Aza talks about a lot is how she feels pressure to tell people that she’s getting better when they ask her how she’s doing, because she reflects that this is the type of narrative that people are both conditioned to and hope to see of mental illness-- one where somebody is suffering, overcomes it, and recovers. Turtles All the Way Down emphasizes that in reality, there’s never simply a miracle cure for mental illness, and that people don’t always “get better,” but that those affected with illnesses like Aza’s can still live happy, fulfilling lives. Green also brings up the point that people have a hard time describing physical or mental pain in words, and often the metaphors we use to convey it simply aren’t sufficient to explain its scope. This is both an issue that Aza tackles in the story, as she struggles to make her friends and family understand what she’s feeling, and Green deals with in the way he writes the story itself-- he avoids simile and metaphor and, through Aza’s narration, directly tries to describe what she’s going through. As a result, I thought that this story was really successful in showing the reader a glimpse of what it’s like in the head of somebody with anxiety and OCD, as well as providing commentary on mental illness and how it’s viewed in general.

I also enjoyed a lot of other aspects of Turtles All the Way Down, especially including its entertaining, relatable, and realistic characters, its somewhat unorthodox love story, and its really moving, powerful ending. Overall, I’d highly recommend it, and found it to be a really fun, interesting read!