Review: Turtles All the Way Down

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Upon finishing this novel I thought back to what I had just listened to (I audiobook-ed it), and came away with the impression that it was an undoubtedly interesting case-study of a teenage girl with a very serious and life-threatening case of mental illness.

What exactly that mental illness may be was left up to reader interpretation, but for the review’s sake I’ll say it had some symptoms of schizophrenia, psychosis, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, dissociative personality disorder, and depression (the usual suspect). However, writing those out felt wrong because Aza’s character was something much too complex to merely shove under some labels, and they really don’t do her justice. Turtles all the Way Down is very much about Aza Holmes and the inner-workings of her mind.

The context of the story in which we readers enter her mind is that of a mystery that has struck the city of Indianapolis. A billionaire suspected of corruption has gone missing, and anyone who can help find him will become the new owner of $100 000. Aza’s childhood friend and across-the-river neighbor, Davis, so happens to be the son of said billionaire, and so—prompted by the prodding of Aza’s best friend, Daisy—they get investigating. (view spoiler)[I was so shocked when it turned out that Davis Sr. was actually dead! When Aza was like, “They had never seriously considered the possibility that he couldn’t give them a call,” (not an exact quote) I was like SAME! I wasn’t that invested in the whole mystery aspect of the story and I never really thought about it much so that definitely got me. (hide spoiler)]

If all I’ve said so far sounds interesting to you then you should go ahead and read this because you’ll probably find it enjoyable. To be able to get such an up-close and intimate experience of mental illness is something I can easily see as being very interesting to outsiders looking in, but as for myself I could not enjoy it because it hit me way too personally and close to home.

I myself used to be super into heavy media that covered macabre, gory, and disturbing content, and those about mentally ill people would often fall under those categories. By that I mean that some mental illnesses can cause people to do disturbing things, such as impulsively pull out their own eyelashes (shoutout to Another Little Piece, my favourite book of 2014), or in the case of this book, repeatedly reopen a wound by jabbing their fingernail into it and shove hand sanitizer down their throat. I used to find these things really interesting and enjoyable to read about, and I was always happy to find something that would shock me or make me “feel” something, as it seemed at the time that I never really felt anything. Anything that would pull some emotions out of me was very welcome.

However, at this point in my life, these are very much NOT things I need to be reading about, and I no longer get a kick out of it. I have crossed the threshold of emotionally absent into emotionally unstable, so thanks but no thanks, but I don’t need this anymore, and I really don’t need to experience the issues of other crazy people via immersive and/or 2nd person narrative. I find it has unhealthy affects on my mental state and even affects my outward personality. So this is going to have to be one for the rest of y’all to gawk your eyes at, not for me.

Despite all my personal problems, I still gave this book 3 stars because I don’t think it was a bad book, and it did do some things quite good.

First and foremost, as you can tell, the mental illness representation was pretty real. Okay, you get it, moving on.

I really quite liked how the romance played out. I can’t say much more without spoiling you, but at the same time I feel like that statement was misleading, because the reason I liked the romance is because… Oh, I don’t want to say too much. (view spoiler)[I nearly always have a very difficult time getting behind the main romance in novels, because they always feel too forced and shoehorned in, and this book was no exception. But at this point in my life I’ve realized that it’s an inevitable evil in contemporary YA so I half-heartedly went along with it, as I knew I must. Whenever the “lovebirds” have their (also inevitable) falling out I’m always like, “BREAK UP, YOU FOOLS” and this book had yet to gain exception status. BUT THEN, *GASP*, THEY DID!!!! OH MY GOD!!! I was like, “WhaAaAaAaAtT??” Fantastic. I love how this book showed both the start AND end of a relationship, not just the star-crossed beginnings, because we all know how fickle teenagers actually are with their relationships so I really liked seeing that being better represented here. (hide spoiler)]It just felt realistic, for ONCE, because YA is always so idealistic. A breath of fresh air, if you will.

(view spoiler)[I also kept waiting for Davis to snap out if it, to realize that Aza is FUCKING CRAZY and obviously too much to handle. I was definitely projecting my own feelings onto Davis, because I know I absolutely can’t deal with other crazy people. I got my own crazy to deal with, sorry, I’m not going to try to handle yours too. So I liked how Daisy was basically a surrogate for me and actually told Aza how annoying she is, which, once again, is just me projecting my feelings of myself. (hide spoiler)] But at the same time, it just felt like the love interest was in a daze the whole time, like he was never fully understanding what was going on. Like he was trying to be supportive but at the same time wasn’t actually there. (view spoiler)[And then he just disappeared. (hide spoiler)] It was kinda weird. I reckon this is a fault on John Green in that he wrote a generic likable-and-pseudo-supportive love interest that ended up feeling pretty flat because we never actually learned all that much about him or his motivations. It’s like he kept being there for Aza but neither he nor us readers could actually understand why.

Overall Turtles all the Way Down was an interesting and in-depth case study of someone with severe mental illness. If you yourself also have some mental problems you might either find it relatable in a pleasant, “Yay, representation in the media!” way, or in a triggering way like I did. I know that I would have loved the content in this book back in my “healthier” days, so I recommend this to people interested in learning more about mental illness.

Keep in mind though that this book is filled with John Green's obnoxiously pretentious philosophising (more details in my Reading Notes section located under this review). Some people love it, some people hate it--I fall under the category of the latter.

TLDR: Trigger warning, lmao.


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