Review: Turtles All the Way Down
“Turtles delivers a lesson that we so desperately need right now. Yes, it is okay to not be okay.”
— MASHABLE
“A thoughtful look at mental illness and a debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder that doesn’t ask but makes you feel the constant struggles of its main character. . . . Turtles explores the definition of happy endings, whether love is a tragedy or a failure, and a universal lesson for us all: ‘You work with what you have.’”— USA TODAY
Turtles All the Way Down, published in 2017, was Green’s last YA novel before turning to the writing and publishing of The Anthropocene Reviewed and Everything is Tuberculosis. It’s also his most personal novel to date, as the story centers around Aza Holmes, a teenager living with crippling OCD, a disorder that Green himself struggles with.
Aza, a 16-year-old high schooler in Indianapolis, IN, is particularly anxious about the gut microbiome and an infection called C. diff, which she spends much of her time obsessively avoiding. She is prone to self-harm behaviors like reopening the same wound on her finger each day and using hand sanitizer obsessively—even drinking it in one scene—in an effort to thwart infection. She is consumed by thought spirals.
One day, her best friend, Daisy, discovers that the billionaire father of Davis, an old friend of Aza’s, has gone missing. A reward is offered for any information leading to his location, so Daisy proposes they reconnect with Davis and work to solve the mystery. But Davis would rather they not continue looking and pays them to stop their search and not share with the authorities. Daisy is satisfied to simply have the payout, but Aza is growing closer to Davis again, as well as his younger brother who desperately misses their father, despite his largely absentee status as a parent. So, she doesn’t give up. When she and Daisy make a discovery one night at an underground art show that ultimately leads to solving the mystery, Davis and his brother must make some tough decisions, and Aza must say goodbye.
Turtles, like Green’s other YA novels, grapples with themes of young love, death, and meaning in hardship. What makes this story stand out is the intense intimacy of being inside Aza’s head. Even though Green’s other novels, with the exception of Katherines, are in first person, Turtles takes this perspective to a different level, as Aza’s voice of non-reason is inside her head with us. So, it’s an experience of almost two simultaneous and warring first-person voices. There’s no personality break, simply out of control thought spirals that will be at least somewhat familiar to most people who have struggled with debilitating anxiety, even if not OCD itself. In this story, the events of the plot serve to push Aza to confronting the permanent nature of her illness, and she must learn to live with it, rather than fight it. She does find some peace in that at the end, and the close leaves the reader with hope for a bright, if not always easy, future.
“It’s not a mountain that you climb or a hurdle that you jump, it’s something that you live with in an ongoing way.” —John Green (2017)