A Review of John Green’s “Turtles All the Way Down”
A Very OCD Novel for Young Adults (That Adults Can Enjoy)
John Green doesn’t need my help in selling his books via a book review. The guy is, arguably, already the biggest name in Young Adult fiction. Goodreads already has, at this count, more than 37,000 customer reviews of his latest novel, Turtles All the Way Down, which came out almost four years ago. So there’s probably no reason for me to write these words down on a computer screen. I’m guessing that most of the traffic that would be curious about this book would have come and gone, and I’ll be lucky if maybe 20 people read this review in my lifetime. However, I do like to occasionally review older titles and I like to review titles that are fun to write book reviews about. So I thought I’d give John Green whatever small hand he deserves in selling his books to the masses. I feel charitable, too, because Turtles All the Way Down, despite being less than 300 pages long, took six years and the need to overcome a crippling case of writer’s block to write.
I’m going to sort of tell you what this book is about, though I’m also going to deliberately gloss over the plot details because there’s not much plot to be had here, but it might help to let you know first that there’s a John Green Fiction Writing Template to writing successful YA fiction. I’ve read three of his novels now (Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, and, now, Turtles All the Way Down) and there’s a pattern that seems to emerge in how Green constructs a plot. Lately, he takes a protagonist and gives them a disease (such as terminal cancer in The Fault in Our Stars or obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD, in Turtles). The protagonist will then meet a member of the opposite sex and either strike up a platonic relationship with them that has sexual overtones to it, or the relationship will blossom into full-out romance. A mystery must be solved (a teenaged girl who disappears in Paper Towns, or an adult billionaire who disappears in Turtles with a $100,000 reward attached to his whereabouts as reported to the police). Part of the drama takes place in high schools given the ages of the characters, in a much more overt way than how workplaces appear in literary fiction. Insert quirky humour interspersed throughout the novel — no matter how serious things get — and, thus, you have the John Green Fiction Writing Template. It’s that easy.
Basically, Turtles All the Way Down follows a teenaged character named Aza. She has OCD and thinks that she’s going to die due to an internal bacterial infection. She picks at a scab covered by a Band-Aid on her finger and is convinced it’ll be her undoing. She drinks antibacterial solution (definitely not good for her) so she doesn’t fall ill (the irony). And she doesn’t take her medication regularly. In this case, Green has written a character who is a full flesh and blood person who suffers from a mental illness — and does a convincing job of portraying the illness properly and making the character seem real as she goes down her spirals. However, I’m of two minds about this. I think it’s great that in a book for teenagers (that adults can also clearly enjoy — there are enough f-bombs in the book’s second half to guarantee that), you have a convincing character with a mental illness that you can sympathize with. At the same time, every time that Aza falls down the rabbit hole in a OCD spiral, it makes the plot slow to the point where it moves with the speed of molasses. Clearly, you could cut 100 pages from this book and lose nothing. Still, the book is moving and beautifully written. Thus, there’s a lot to appreciate here and you can get wound up in the lives of the people who people this novel.
There is one aspect of the book that falls flat, though. Any time that Aza meets with her psychiatrist, the dialogue is completely unbelievable. The therapist practically quotes philosophy and Aza and her banter back and forth quite a bit about anything under the sun. A real therapist would open with a stock question — such as, “Are you taking your medication?” Or “What’s your mood like?” And then they will proceed from there to determine how the patient is doing. I think it’s not shameful to note that I have visited a therapist at various points in my life, and never had a relationship with them that Aza has with her doctor. The banter didn’t seem realistic and I think I’m a good person to judge that based on real-world experience. However, this being a John Green book, you have to realize that everything in the novel is beyond being real. After all, a giant lizard features as a major background character in this read, too. Need I say more?
All in all, I find John Green books to be rather average. I can see why he’s successful in finding an audience and why he has won awards and accolades. He’s a good writer. Still, there’s just something about his books that I find a little bit irritating — that he tries too hard to be cool or make a disease or condition seem hip when, in reality, his characters are dying (or think they are). I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something always seems off in his novels. However, they do offer escapism from the problems of day-to-day life by putting you in the shoes of people with problems of their own. To that end, John Green certainly has a formula down pat. Whether or not you will like Turtles All the Way Down really depends on how you feel about John Green as a writer. If you’re new to Green, this might be a bit of a slow read. (I might suggest you start at Paper Towns, instead.) Still, if you can get past the smugness, Turtles All the Way Down is an important book for how it humanizes complex characters that, in real life, might be a bit scary to know. For that, Green deserves the accolades, and he certainly doesn’t need me to say that.
John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down was published by Dutton Books for Young Readers on October 10, 2017.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
