I hadn’t read a John Green novel since about 2013, and reading this now definitely took me back. I didn’t like this one as much as I remember liking some of his other books in middle school and high school, but I do think he’s improved on several fronts since then, especially when it comes to diversity.

The Star Wars fanfiction thing really threw me for a loop. I was not expecting Daisy to be a Rey x Chewbacca shipper, but she is. Bizarre.

This book contains mystery and teen romance (that blissfully isn’t the main focus) and a prehistoric reptile called a tuatara and also what I think is the first proper strong female friendship in a John Green novel. There’s a lot going on for such a short book, and I thought that most of it was executed really well.

The main focus of the book, though, is Aza’s mental illness. The symptoms of her OCD are described in poetic but extremely graphic ways throughout the book, and it was occasionally difficult to read. I never felt like it was sensationalizing mental illness, though. The focus is on how much Aza longs for recovery but also fears it while knowing that she will never be fully “well.” She has a lot of intrusive thoughts, which she calls “invasives,” and she spends a lot of time lost in the spiral of those thoughts. She also, ironically for a fictional character, spends a lot of time questioning reality and thinking that she might not be real. That almost feels like a cruel joke on the part of the author, but it worked for this particular character.

This book is also full of John Green’s signature philosophical teen dialogue that I thought was the smartest thing ever when I was thirteen. I still don’t mind it, but wow does Davis come off as pretentious.

CW for discussions of dead parents, including some vague spoilers, in the rest of this review.

The only thing that really bugged me about this book was the way it handled the topic of dead parents. Dead parents are often a plot device in contemporary literary fiction, including in lit fic aimed at teens, and Turtles All the Way Down definitely fell prey to that to an extent. In the past, Aza and Davis were brought together because they both had a dead parent, and in the present, they spend a lot of time talking about the subject. 

Some things felt incredibly realistic: The way that Aza almost weaponizes her dead parent when talking to Daisy. The way that Daisy had failed to consider how much having a dead parent would have impacted Aza’s life in the same way that Aza’s privilege and self-centeredness had blinded her to the realities of Daisy’s life (that whole conversation and the ensuing disaster was actually the most impactful part of the book for me). The way that Aza keeps her father’s old phone just to still have a piece of him.

But then we get those classic John Green ruminations on life and death that are often so poignant, but in this case, Aza’s meditations on how having a dead parent changes you fell completely flat for me. They also never came up again. It was very apparent in that moment that the author had never lost a parent and didn’t actually understand what it would be like and was just making things up based on other loss he’d experienced in his life. And that’s okay! I don’t think that authors need to experience everything they’re going to write about, especially not something as horrible and life-altering as this. But I do think that sometimes it’s wise to avoid having your fictional characters philosophize about a subject that you don’t understand.