A Bit Bookish

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoy John Green’s writing. The book he’s best known for, The Fault in our Stars, was such a lovely, funny, and heartbreaking book. So I was really looking forward to reading his latest effort, even though it is on a difficult subject—OCD. Green has struggled with severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder for about as long as he can remember. He is able to keep it in check with medication and therapy, but every once in a while, it consumes him. He says he couldn’t escape the spiral of his thoughts, and after he recovered he started writing this book—a wrenching look into what it’s like to live in constant fear of your own mind. Coming out of that experience, he felt that it was difficult to write about anything else. His main character here, Aza Holmes, is a 16 year old girl in Indianapolis who struggles with anxiety and obsessive thought spirals. Aza has all the normal teenage issues—trying to navigate the rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood, dating, worrying about college, dealing with an overly concerned mother, appeasing her best friend. But she is also overcome by extreme dread. She is certain that a cut on her finger (which she presses uncontrollably) will become infected and she’ll die, she often wonders if she is fictional. She can’t direct her own thoughts, so who is really controlling her? Though it is hard for me to understand this disorder, I feel like I do understand it better after reading this book. Green’s trademark quirky humor and sharp sensitive portrayal of teenage characters is awe inspiring.


View all my reviews