Turtles All the Way Down
The last time we heard from John Green was around 2014 when everybody was going through an obsessive phase over Hazel Grace Lancaster and her beloved hottie, Augustus Waters.
And he kind of, well, disappeared for a while, leaving a trend of "girl with cancer meets a hot boy with cancer and falls in love" in the Young Adult (Y/A) novel industry. And when he did come back in 2017, he brought along his new novel, Turtles All The Way Down. Unfortunately, it didn't do so great as TFIOS did.
Turtles All The Way Down is just like any other John Green's novel. It's about a girl who suffers through a severe case of OCD. She has a normal life, normal friends, normal teachers, and a normal family. But when she discovers that her billionaire childhood friend's father has suddenly disappeared, she goes on an unintended adventure with her best friend. Everything suddenly builds up, and Aza, just like any other 16-year-old her age, strives to fight for what she believes is right.
One of Green's main focuses in this novel is mental health. Aza, who grieves for her father's death and is forced to witness her mom going through a financial struggle, goes through severe anxiety attacks and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) that nobody but herself is aware of. We watch her go through a series of difficult moments where she fights with her best friend, is forced to be thrown into a pit of financial burden, and eventually gets hospitalized. Most writers would be iffy and simply dip their pinky toe into the pond of the whole topic, but John Green didn't; instead, he portrayed mental illness just the way it is that a lot of people go through in real life. He didn't praise it; he didn't promote it; he didn't mock it.
The characters were quirky and fun. Simply said, the characters of TATWD were just like any other of John Green's characters. Aza is like Q. Daisy is Alaska. Davis is Augustus. They speak in nothing but philosophical metaphors that wouldn't normally come out from a normal teenager's mouth.
The writing was brilliant, as per usual. John Green's novels could easily be distinguished from other mainstream Y/A writers. He pours down his thoughts and digs deep into the roots of what we all ponder. That's what John Green does best - he translate our thoughts into English that we can fathom (ha-ha) and connect.
With that being said, the plot, once again, has very disappointing structure. Like The Fault In Our Stars and An Abundance of Katherines, TATWD had absolutely no plot. It was a story that simply featured a significant part of an average American teenage girl's life -- a life that didn't happen to be realistic, either. I guess this was because a majority of the novel focused highly on the philosophical aspect of the novel; half of the dialogues were literally just a bunch of wise old dudes stuck in sixteen-year-old bodies talking about the origins of the universe and the "self". The novel was not a story; it was merely just one huge metaphor that none of the readers but John Green understood.
Despite all this, TATWD was a great novel to read. The dialogue was amazing and the writing was spectacular. The portrayal of Aza Holmes was done in such a powerful way and it was a good reminder for all the readers out there to be reminded that mental illness is something that you don't have to hide. It's not something that you go through alone on a daily basis. There are people out there, and I think John Green has done nothing but an excellent job to create and design a character that is not only metaphorically correct but someone who can understand and reach out to the individual's heart of the community.