Book Review - Turtles All The Way Down

                                                                                                                                             

A John Green Novel.

** Spoiler Alert, you've been warned. **

SYNOPSIS: It all begins with a fugitive billionaire and the promise of a cash reward. Turtles All the Way Down is about lifelong friendship, the intimacy of an unexpected reunion, Star Wars fan fiction and tuatara. But at its heart is Aza Holmes, a young woman navigating daily existence within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts.In his long-awaited return, John Green shares Aza's story with shattering, unflinching clarity.

Here's what I thought about it:

I think the thing about a John Green novel is that more than it gives you the story, It gives you the feels of the truth. The truth which would probably be too harsh to accept or the truth which is the absolutely correct interpretation of it that leaves you baffled.

For those who didn’t get the cover of the book, the spiral signifies a thought spiral while the title stands for, well, it being turtles all the way down (there’s a story inside the story which explains it).

Aza suffers from anxiety and OCD and to be honest I found out drinking hand sanitizer was really weird and well, that’s what she did because she was afraid of catching C diff (a bacterial disease).

I don’t know much about these bacterial diseases but I realized that if you worry a lot about them, it can literally drive the scare into you. In other words, you’d be better off without OCD.

She finds her thoughts to be ever tightening into a never ending spiral, which is one of the things that I liked about the story. That your thoughts are truly inescapable and that most of the times it’s your thoughts that control you than you controlling your thoughts.

It all begins with the disappearance of the millionaire Russell Davis Pickett that Daisy (the main protagonist’s friend) and Aza (the main protagonist) set out to look for him, or anything that might lead to him for the award of a thousand dollars.

But they also know Davis Pickett, the son of the millionaire who thinks they are better off with his dad gone.

Just a thing about John Green books, there wasn’t a proper plot, but a missing person being the reason some people crossed paths again and a peek into a person’s mind and also how others saw the same person.  

So, in the story, there wasn’t any real search only it always being in the back of the characters’ minds. But even then, that was what it was all about.

There were a series of realizations without which a John Green novel is incomplete such as the one where he says that our life is a story told about us, not by us. This sounds true because when we look for ourselves, we’re mostly a bundle of reasons, decisions and circumstances which make us who we are. We may not be able to choose what happens to us but still we can be anyone. How crazy is that? No sarcasm intended.

And then there’s one where he says ‘To be alive is to be missing’ wherein missing stand for the ones you’ve lost.

Ultimately, towards the end we find out the millionaire, dead in a sewer. This sounds super disgusting but the incomplete sewer project was one of his company’s works and, well that was the jogger’s mouth. – The end of the story.

Like I said, there was more of discovering ourselves in the book that discovering the depths of the mystery in here. And I guess that’s what makes a John Green novel complete.

This story somehow makes me think that we’re always being watched. Like Aza was, like Davis was. Which is often discomforting.

But I can't help mentioning the fact that, so far, not my favourite John Green book. I definitely liked Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska more.