Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

At the start of Turtles All the Way Down, Aza Holmes’s best friend, Daisy Ramirez, is talking about a news story: a local billionaire was about to be arrested on bribery-related charges, but he disappeared just before the raid. Aza, it turns out, used to be friends with one of the missing guy’s two sons: they went to camp together when they were eleven. Later, they hear on the radio that there’s a $100,000 reward for information leading to the missing guy’s whereabouts: so of course, they decide to try to solve the mystery and get the reward. Which, of course, reunites Aza with her old camp friend, Davis Pickett, who she totally had a crush on when they were kids, and who turns out to be a sweet and sensitive guy now.

So the story is about Aza and Davis and Daisy and regular high school stuff—dating/not dating, tensions between friends, etc.— and also about Davis’s missing dad—and also about Aza’s mental health. She has OCD and has been struggling her whole life with intrusive thoughts, particularly around bacteria/the possibility of a fatal bacterial infection, and there’s a lot in the book about how she feels stuck in her own spiraling thoughts, trapped in a body that kind of terrifies her. I like the way the book is a mix of Aza’s narration and her exchanges via text with Davis and blog entries he writes that she reads; I like the way they’re trying to figure out intimacy when both of them also have other stuff going on in their lives that makes that challenging.

Spirals are a recurring image in the book—spiraling thoughts, this Raymond Pettibon painting, the spiral of our galaxy: I liked this quote a lot, from one of several times when Davis and Aza look at the night sky together:

In the moonless darkness, we were just witnesses to light, and I felt a sliver of what must have driven Davis to astronomy. There was a kind of relief in having your own smallness laid bare before you, and I realized something Davis must have already known: Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out. (284)

I’ve been meaning to read this book since it came out, and am glad I finally got around to it. It turned out to be a perfect book to finish on a day when I was home sick with a fever: so sweet, so compelling, and it totally made me cry. Also, my boyfriend, who doesn’t read YA at all, read this book before I did (I had initially checked it out from the library before a business trip last month and didn’t get to it in time) and he liked it a whole lot too, which I think says something about John Green in general and this book in particular.


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