Turtles All the Way Down

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.

I have been a nerdfighter for quite some years now, and I enjoy Hank and John’s videos and podcasts. I was a bit weary about purchasing and reading the book because unfortunately John’s books tend to have the same outline of a story. The first John Green book I ever read was Looking For Alaska and I thought it was such an amazing book. Then I read The Fault in Our Stars…and it felt the same as Looking For Alaska. The I read Paper Towns and it still had the sameness as the other two and I couldn’t even make it past the first chapter of An Abundance of Katherines. Turtles is different. It breaks away from John’s usual two teens falling in love but nothing is really better routine. It is more than that and it is exceptional. This book breathed John Green, the goofy guy on the internet that is semi-open about his mental illness and makes videos with his brother. Turtles All The Way Down is not a love story. It’s not a mystery novel. It’s not a self discovery book. It’s a story of accepting ourselves because we are not alone even when we are trapped in our heads. It is an ode to those with mental illnesses who are screaming inside themselves trying to be heard. Telling them that it is okay to feel that way and that you are not crazy. Personally, I am privilege to be healthy with no physical or mental illness. I do suffer with anxiety sometimes, especially in situations that include too many people or too many things happening at once. Even with that I do not think I suffer from anxiety but from I am not a people person. So, I do not and will never truly understand what people with mental illness feel. What I do know is that it is different for everyone, because brains are funny that way. I think we all need to understand every individual handles illnesses differently. In Turtles All The Way Down we follow the story of Aza, a sixteen-year-old girl who suffers with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and it pretty much controls and defines who she is and how she lives her life. Her OCD is a lot like John’s ( I know this cause he has been open about it on Dear Hank and John Podcast ), where once there is a thought in her head it consumes her like a tightening downward spiral. Throughout the story we watch as Aza deals with regular teenage things such as school, teenage love, family and friendship but with her trying to “get better” from her OCD. ( Get better is in quotations because it is not really true, but I explain it further I might ruin a key element of the book). “The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.” John is a fantastic writer, he knows how to write and how to give emotion to a story. It is has been his forte ever since Looking For Alaska. There is no denying that he has become a stronger writer and his books will stay relevant in the literature world for many years to come. He knows how to tell a story even if the idea can be repetitive and the same. “One of the challenges with pain--physical or psychic--is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can't be represented the way table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” What made this story realistic is that Aza was not magically fixed by a boy, or a friend or by herself. She continued on living with her OCD, aware of what it can do, but also aware that she will have her good days and her bad days. All she could do is keep going because it was not something that ever goes away and she understood that at the end. I do feel that the ending of the story felt quite abrupt, and frankly I was caught off guard at the sudden ending even though it felt right. It was honesty quite odd. “The problem with happy endings is that they're either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.” Rating: 4.5/5

No traía ningún tipo de protección, me sorprende que haya llegado en excelente condición.

Good book

good delivery etc. loved this writing more than john green's other books.

If you know me, you’ll know that I love John Green. I adore all of his books and I’m pretty much a walking cliché for it. So naturally, I’ve been waiting for Turtles All the way Down for years… like, literally yeas. I ordered it the day it came out and a few days later, it was on my doorstep. First of all… I have to admit that I cried when I saw the special dust jacket cover which has a poster of all his most famous book quotes from his previous books. So yeah, that happened. But anyway… onto this book. I have a lot to say so I’m going to review it a little different, in sections rather than one great big whack of writing. What’s it about? Turtles All the Way Down is about Aza and her best friend Daisy who discover that a billionaire in their town has gone missing. Not only that, there’s a huge reward for anyone who can help locate him. And not only that, Aza used to be good friends with his son. Aza and Davis become close and have to navigate through their relationship and their own issues, including Aza’s severe OCD and mental health problems. Storyline Admittedly, it wasn’t the most riveting storyline in terms of action. The billionaire storyline probably wasn’t strictly needed but unlike so many others, I actually really liked it winding through the main elements which is firmly Aza’s OCD and anxiety (more on that later). I thought the missing billionaire element could have been a bit “more” but I also understand that it was more about Davis and his brother, Noah’s reaction to their negligent, missing dad rather than the dad himself. Mental health & Aza John Green did an amazing job with Aza. Written from her point of view, you get a real, raw sense of what it’s like being in the mind of someone with OCD. Although I have anxiety, I don’t have OCD nor do I know too much about it and the thought processes that people with the condition have on a daily basis. But this book truly made me understand more. If you’re one of those people that say something is, “a little bit OCD” then I would highly suggest you read this book because I guarantee you will stop saying something so insensitive after reading it. It was heart-breaking at times, seeing Aza’s constant struggle with her own mind. It’s quite obvious that Green went through extensive research for this character and her condition. We’ve all read books with mental health themes which weren’t sensitive or accurate and generally just got it really wrong but John Green knows what he’s doing, he understands and you can tell that straight away from this book. He doesn’t try and make Aza anything she’s not. She is what she is, thinks how she thinks and that’s that, we take her or leave her but we’re also led to sympathise with her and really feel for her as a character. Characters Aside from Aza who I’ve gone in to, I absolutely loved Aza’s best friend Daisy, she had such a huge personality and was probably my favourite character in the whole book – she’s the kind of person I’d love to be friends with myself (she also writes Star Wars fan fiction,what more could you want?) She’s a huge contrast to Aza, in fact the complete opposite and despite the fact they clash quite heavily in one part of the book, I think it makes them better friends that they are so different. I would have liked to read more about Davis and know him more because on the surface, he’s a really interesting and intriguing character. He’s clearly quite lost in himself and in life – perhaps because of growing up a billionaire’s son and not having a mum but I liked the insights into his blog and his poetry. There wasn’t many more main-ish characters but I think the characters such as Aza’s mum and her psychologist were very well written but also very annoying but I think that was intentional, especially because the book was written in Aza’s POV. From my own anxiety experiences, I know that people can come across as annoying when dealing with your mental health, even though their intentions are well. Final thoughts After such a long wait, I personally was not disappointed in the slightest with Turtles All the Way Down. As always, it captures Green’s beautiful way with words and his immaculate ability to make you think about yourself and life in completely different ways. It was effortlessly written and effortless to read – it was without a doubt the quickest book I’ve read all year and I’m not a fast reader. Although it’s not the most action-packed and riveting book, it packs a punch, delivers a message and it made me think about the idea of the “self”, of our thoughts and actions and what it means to love and miss people. Nothing I say will do this book justice for me. I adored every bit of it.

I finished this book is just over a day, it was that good a read! The story is about Aza, a troubled teen with mental health problems, and her best friend Daisy. Right from the beginning, the reader is taken inside Aza's head, along with the confusion of her thoughts and her way of seeing the world around her. I would think most of us can find something here to relate to, if we think back to our own teens. The story draws you and keeps you turning the pages, as Aza tries to help an old friend, Davis, come to terms with the disappearance of his father while still mourning the death of her own. Add an adoration for Harold the car, an irrational fear of C. Diff, and of other microbes that could be ingested when kissing, for a completely complex character who will endear herself to the reader. I highly recommend this book.