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Title: Turtles all the Way Down by John Green
Details: Copyright 2017, Penguin Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap: "Sixteen-year-old Aza Holmes never intended to pursue the mystery of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward at stake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate. So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them from Russell Pickett’s son Davis.
Aza is trying. She is trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, and maybe even a good detective, while also living within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts.
In his long-awaited return, John Green, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Looking For Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, shares Aza's story with shattering, unflinching clarity in this brilliant novel of love, resilience, and the power of lifelong friendship."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Making my way through John Green's books! A year and a half ago or so, I pushed past all I had heard about Green to read his first work, Looking For Alaska and was staggered. Last year I read The Fault in Our Stars and was staggered again.
Convinced from those two books that John Green only wrote authentic teens with well-paced, brilliant books, this year I read An Abundance of Katherines and was extremely disappointed. Also this year, I read Paper Towns which was considerably better than Katherines, but still fell short of Alaska or Stars.
This was the last of Green's solo work (so far) that I hadn't read, and also his most recent work, published after the mega-hit that was The Fault in Our Stars and its successful screen adaptation.
How I Liked It: CONTENT WARNING! THIS BOOK CONTAINS DETAILED DEPICTIONS OF MENTAL ILLNESS AND THE REVIEW MENTIONS THEM. PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY.
What makes a something underrated? What even is "underrated"? I'm genuinely curious. The cultural commentator Nathan Rabin, coiner of the (overused and misused to the point where he apologized for its creation) term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" as a sexist trope, had an extremely popular and entertaining column where he examined media flops (usually films, but occasionally other media) and why they flopped and whether or not they were secretly good. Can something that's a hit at release age poorly as times change and it's later reevaluated? Can something be forgotten at the time but found to be brilliant later? What does this mean for books? Read on!
Meet Aza Holmes, a severely anxious teenager still coping with her father's sudden death from a heart attack years before. Fortunately her best friend Daisy is extremely outgoing and forgiving and tolerates her friend's silences, spirals, and other disturbances, and they hang out regularly.
Their town is rocked by the disappearance of a weird billionaire (Aza notes that no part of their town is a particularly nice area, but the mansion where Russell Pickett lives is a part of town all itself) whose two teenage sons (the older of which, Davis, attended a camp for children of deceased parents with Aza years before) are left to fend for themselves among lifelong staff. There's a reward for information, and Daisy, considerably more financially strapped than Aza, is after it.
This leads the two girls to go canoeing around the mansion looking for clues. When caught by security, Daisy stages a canoe accident and pushes Aza to meet with Davis. Davis meets with them and they reconnect (helped by Daisy's blurting out that Aza has a crush on Davis, an ambitious lie that is only really partially a lie).
So Davis and Aza start tentatively dating (Aza is interested in him, not the reward). Daisy is attempting to solve the mystery of the missing billionaire and Davis confides in Aza that he doesn't want his negligent, at times borderline-abusive father found. His father has left his entire estate to a rare reptile (based on some very weird beliefs he has about the species being the secret to immortality) besides. He gives her one hundred thousand dollars (which is still not enough to fund college completely, of course, even had Aza kept it all for herself; a nice zing on the horrific state of college tuition in the U.S.) from his father's secret stash not to find his father. Aza shares the money with Daisy.
Daisy is dating the girls' friend Mychal now and the two even double-date with Aza and Davis, but things are far from good. Aza's illness is hurting worse than ever, and preventing her from having a relationship with Davis, who has plenty of issues of his own (when her mother finally meets Davis, she lectures him that he might be rich, but her daughter deserves to be treated well, something that breaks Davis into tears due to how much he misses his own mother). They manage a relationship long-distance by text which helps Aza's anxiety and OCD, but it's not enough for Davis.
Things come to a head when Aza discovers that her friend Daisy, who has long-since wrote Star Wars fan fiction, has made a particularly cruel original character based on her, and on Daisy's frustrations with their friendship (and what Daisy perceives as Aza's selfishness about her illness and unawareness of her own financial privilege over Daisy). Hurt and coping with this on top of everything else, they get into an argument that totals Aza's beloved old car, Harold, and more importantly ruins her late father's old phone, and most importantly, lands her in hospital.
Forced to confront some of her worst fears and anxieties while in the hospital (and acting out against them), Aza sees her therapist and agrees to actually take her prescribed medication (the idea that she had to take medication to be herself was something too much to bear). She makes a slow recovery, but is still not okay.
She and Davis part ways and she and Daisy (with whom she's made up after their fight that caused the car crash) accidentally stumble across the answer to where Davis's missing father had gone.
The book ends with Aza imagining both past selves and future selves and how her future will go, and who she is now.
So given my other reviews of John Green's work, you may be wondering where this book falls in terms of greatness. His best work before this was 2005's Looking For Alaska and 2012's The Fault in Our Stars, existing on a tier of greatness almost all on its own in terms of acclaim (and genuine quality outside the acclaim). I'd say the nadir of his work (I've read now everything save for his collaborations) is 2006's An Abundance of Katherines, and something falling in the middle but thankfully closer to Stars and Alaska is 2008's Paper Towns. I didn't read his work in order of publication, though, I happened to read his most successful and best-known works first (which are actually first and mid in his career so far), and then early, earlier mid, and now latest. So all things considered, his solo work before this novel, has pretty much followed the trajectory of brilliant, not very good, pretty good, brilliant. Which is pretty damn good for an author. Particularly since I'm relieved to report that this book lands firmly in the camp with Alaska and Stars as brilliant.
It's not only as brilliant as Green's previous best work though. It's brilliant all on its own. I spent a not inconsiderable part of my teens well into my twenties reading and watching and listening to so much media considered mental health "classics" that are held up (both rightly and not so rightly) as the greatest artistic examples of mental health struggle. Consuming them was both an insight into the afflicted (to help us understand) as well as a cathartic cry for freedom in which we feel vindicated that we are absolutely not alone: someone else felt this way, too.
Turtles All the Way Down should rightly be held in regard with other classics not only of this genre, but in general. So much of what Green portrays is chilling because it feels so authentic.
As kids, Daisy and I had played all up and down the riverbank when the water was low like this. We played a game called “river kids,” imagining we lived alone on the river, scavenging for our livelihood and hiding from the adults who wanted to put us in an orphanage. I remembered Daisy throwing daddy longlegs at me because she knew I hated them, and I’d scream and run away, flailing my arms but not actually scared, because back then all emotions felt like play, like I was experimenting with feeling rather than stuck with it. True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter. (pg 22)
Aza has a perpetual injury on her hand (more due to anxiety than actual harm) that she keeps covered with a bandage as well as her toxic thought spirals.
When I got home, I watched TV with Mom, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Davis looking down at my finger, holding my hand in his.
I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls “intrusives,” but the first time she said it, I heard “invasives,” which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway
land, and then they spread out of control.
Supposedly everyone has them— you look out from over a bridge or whatever and it occurs to you out of nowhere that you could just jump. And then if you’re most people, you think, Well, that was a weird thought, and move on with your life. But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have, the thought you’re perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself
from.
You’re watching TV with your mom— this show about time-traveling crime solvers—and you remember a boy holding your hand, looking at your finger, and then a thought occurs to you: You should unwrap that Band-Aid and check to see if there is an infection.
You don’t actually want to do this; it’s just an invasive. Everyone has them. But you can’t shut yours up. Since you’ve had a reasonable amount of cognitive behavioral therapy, you tell yourself, I am not my thoughts, even though deep down you’re not sure what exactly that makes you. Then you tell yourself to click a little x in the top corner of the thought to make it go away. And maybe it does for a moment; you’re back in your house, on the couch,next to your mom, and then your brain says, Well, but wait. What if your finger is infected? Why not just check? The cafeteria wasn’t exactly the most sanitary place to reopen that wound. And then you were in the river.
Now you’re nervous, because you’ve previously attended this exact rodeo on thousands of occasions, and also because you want to choose the thoughts that are called yours. The river was filthy, after all. Had you gotten some river
water on your hand? It wouldn’t take much. Time to unwrap the Band-Aid. You tell yourself that you were careful not to touch the water, but your self replies, But what if you touched something that touched the water, and then you tell yourself that this wound is almost certainly not infected, but the distance you’ve created with the almost gets filled by the thought, You need to check for infection; just check it so we can calm down, and then fine, okay, you excuse yourself to the bathroom and slip off the Band-Aid to discover that there isn’t blood, but there might be a bit of moisture on the bandage pad. You hold the Band-Aid up to the yellow light in the bathroom, and yes, that definitely looks like moisture.
Could be sweat, of course, but also might be water from the river, or worse still seropurulent drainage, a sure sign of infection, so you find the hand sanitizer in the medicine cabinet and squeeze some onto your fingertip,
which burns like hell, and then you wash your hands thoroughly, singing your ABCs while you do to make sure you’ve scrubbed for the full twenty seconds recommended by the Centers for Disease Control, and then you carefully dry
your hands with a towel. And then you dig your thumbnail all the way into the crack in the callus until it starts bleeding, and you squeeze the blood out for as long as it comes, and then you blot the wound dry with a tissue. You
take a Band-Aid from inside your jeans pocket, where there is never a shortage of them, and you carefully reapply the bandage. You return to the couch to watch TV, and for a few or many minutes, you feel the shivering jolt
of the tension easing, the relief of giving in to the lesser angels of your nature.
And then two or five or six hundred minutes pass before you start to wonder, Wait, did I get all the pus out? Was there pus even or was that only sweat? If it was pus, you might need to drain the wound again.
The spiral tightens, like that, forever. (pgs 45, 46, and 47)
The whole way up, I thought about what I’d say to Dr. Singh. I can’t properly think and listen to the radio at the same time, so it was quiet in the car, except for the thumping rumble of Harold’s mechanical heart. I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative
of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense. (pg 85)
"Illness is a story told in the past tense" is so good someone somewhere must have said it before, but that's also how you know something is truly brilliant: it feels like ancient knowledge.
“When did you put that Band-Aid on?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. She stared at me, unblinking. “After lunch.”
“And with your fear of C. diff?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it happens.”
“Do you feel that you’re able to resist the—”
“No,” I said. “I mean, I’m still crazy, if that’s what you’re asking. There has been no change on the being crazy front.”
“I’ve noticed you use that word a lot, crazy. And you sound angry when you say it, almost like you’re calling yourself a name.”
“Well, everyone’s crazy these days, Dr. Singh. Adolescent sanity is so twentieth century.”
“It sounds to me like you’re being cruel to yourself.”
After a moment, I said, “How can you be anything to your self? I mean, if you can be something to your self, then your self isn’t, like, singular.”
“You’re deflecting.” I just stared at her. “You’re right that self isn’t simple, Aza. Maybe it’s not even singular. Self is a plurality, but pluralities can also be integrated, right? Think of a rainbow. It’s one arc of light, but also seven differently colored arcs of light.”
“Okay, well, I feel more like seven things than one thing.”
“Do you feel like your thought patterns are impeding your daily life?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“Can you give me an example?”
“I don’t know, like, I’ll be at the cafeteria and I’ll start thinking about how, like, there are all these things living inside of me that eat my food for me, and how I sort of am them, in a way— like, I’m not a human person so
much as this disgusting, teeming blob of bacteria, and there’s not really any getting myself clean, you know, because the dirtiness goes all the way through me. Like, I can’t find the deep down part of me that’s pure or
unsullied or whatever, the part of me where my soul is supposed to be. Which means that I have maybe, like, no more of a soul than the bacteria do.”
“That’s not uncommon,” she said. Her catchphrase. Dr. Singh then asked if I was willing to try exposure response therapy again, which I’d done back when I first started seeing her. Basically I had to do stuff like touch my
callused finger against a dirty surface and then not clean it or put a Band-Aid on. It had sort of worked for a while, but now all I could remember was how scared it had made me, and I couldn’t bear the thought of being that scared again, so I just shook my head no at the mention of it. “Are you taking your Lexapro?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. She just stared at me. “It freaks me out some to take it, so not every day.”
“Freaks you out?”
“I don’t know.” She kept watching me, her foot tapping. The air felt dead in the room. “If taking a pill makes you different, like, if it changes the way-down you . . . that’s just a screwed-up idea, you know? Who’s deciding what
me means—me or the employees of the factory that makes Lexapro? It’s like I have this demon inside of me, and I want it gone, but the idea of removing it via pill is... I don’t know... weird. But a lot of days I get over that, because I do really hate the demon.”
“You often try to understand your experience through metaphor, Aza: It’s like a demon inside of you; you’ll call your consciousness a bus, or a prison cell, or a spiral, or a whirlpool, or a loop, or a— I think you once called it a scribbled circle, which I found interesting.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“One of the challenges with pain— physical or psychic— is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” (pgs 86, 87, 88, 89)
“I guess I just don’t like having to live inside of a body? If that makes sense. And I think maybe deep down I am just an instrument that exists to turn oxygen into carbon dioxide, just like merely an organism in this... vastness. And it’s kind of terrifying to me that what I think of as, like, my quote unquote self isn’t really under my control? Like, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, my hand is sweating right now, even though it’s too cold for sweating, and I really hate that once I start sweating I can’t stop, and then I can’t think about anything else except for how I’m sweating. And if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.” (pgs 104 and 105)
I told him about this mathematician Kurt Gödel, who had this really bad fear of being poisoned, so much so that he couldn’t bring himself to eat food unless it was prepared by his wife. And then one day his wife got sick and had to go into the hospital, so Gödel stopped eating. I told Davis how even though
Gödel must’ve known that starvation was a greater risk than poisoning, he just couldn’t eat, and so he starved to death. At seventy-one. He cohabitated with the demon for seventy-one years, and then it got him in the end.
When I’d finished the story, he asked, “Do you worry that will happen to you?”
And I said, “It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it.
Because you can’t be sure, you know? If you’re Gödel, you just can’t be sure your food isn’t poisoned.”
“Do you worry that will happen to you?” he asked again.
“I worry about a lot of things.” (pg 203)
The book doesn't offer an easy recovery or easy answers. It portrays mental illness not as one hurdle, but accurately as a lifelong struggle, but the book is still uplifting and ends more or less happily (and not tritely, either). I actually got chills at how staggeringly, disarmingly accurate Green's depictions of anxiety spirals were, something that is so incredibly hard to get right in fiction.
But it's not just the mental health aspects that make the book shine. The teenagers are thankfully realistic teenagers who have other interests and complaints other than "popular people" and their high school's popularity ecosystem. The characters feel like real people, something Green apparently gets hit and miss (although this would be his second hit in a row after Stars so let's hope it sticks). They're interesting but not quirky for the sake of quirky (any more than most teenagers are quirky anyway, because you're figuring yourself out).
The pacing is what I've now seen (save for one book) as characteristically tight: the book's a page-turner.
The book has many lessons about loss and recovery and fresh starts and perspective and yet never manages to make them seem forced or treacly.
So all of that leaves me with my question: why hadn't I heard of this particular book until now?
Granted, it's Green's most recent, after a long delay between the mega-success (including a popular film adaptation) of The Fault in Our Stars. But that's still six years of publication (at the time of this review). The only Green books I had heard of before this were Alaska and Stars. Alaska had been published nearly a decade at the time I had first heard of Green, and Stars had reached past bestseller to mega-stardom with the movie. But Green's other work, An Abundance of Katherines and Paper Towns I'd never heard of, despite Paper Towns having a film adaptation (which only did okay financially and "meh" by critics). Katherines deserves to be forgotten, Paper Towns was better but only "good" by comparison to Stars and Alaska.
But Turtles all the Way Down is brilliant and deserves all the acclaim it gets and more.
To be fair, a cursory search shows a film adaptation of this book has been planned for years (but stuck in development hell) and for better or worse, adaptations always draw attention to their source material. In the meantime, the book had fairly positive reviews from critics who at least recognize its value.
Is this book underrated? Since it's been out for seven years and I only recently heard of it, yes. It's an excellent, chilling, brilliant look at a topic that is simultaneously well-plumbed but so hard to get right. Green got it right.
Notable: In the years between 2012 and 2017, mainstream culture (primarily American mainstream culture) made huge steps forward in our common understanding about gender and what Queer communities have always known (for the most part) starting becoming acknowledged. Trans and nonbinary people (who qualify under the trans umbrella) who have always existed, gained newfound understanding and there started to be more and more openly trans and nonbinary celebrities. Unfortunately, it was part of that newfound understanding that led to our current backlash of bigoted morons (more accurately, those seeking to control bigoted morons and their money and votes) eagerly choosing that as their community to scrape-goat (and completely not understanding what drag performers are besides), but language, especially among teenagers, had to catch up.
“Holmesy,” Daisy said. I looked up at her. “We’re almost through lunch
and you haven’t even mentioned my hair.” She shook out her hair, with so-red-they-were-pink highlights. Right. She’d dyed her hair.
I swum up out of the depths and said, “It’s bold.”
“I know, right? It says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen and also people who do not identify as ladies or gentlemen, Daisy Ramirez won’t break her promises, but she will break your heart.” Daisy’s self-proclaimed life motto was “Break
Hearts, Not Promises.” She kept threatening to get it tattooed on her ankle when she turned eighteen. Daisy turned back to Mychal, and I to my thoughts. The stomach grumbling had grown, if anything, louder. I felt like I might
vomit. For someone who actively dislikes bodily fluids, I throw up quite a lot. (pg 6)
For the record? Say "distinguished guests", not "ladies and gentlemen." I genuinely appreciate the effort, though.
Speaking of how teenagers talk! While Green has blessedly been pretty good with capturing realistic teenagers, not stereotypes, he's made some missteps. Thankfully, this book is more right than wrong.
Daisy, Aza's best friend, writes fan fiction in online communities, and it has its drawbacks.
. “Ugh, God, now this guy is saying I write bestiality.”
“Wait, what?”
“Because in my fic, Chewbacca and Rey were in love. He’s saying it is— and I am quoting—‘criminal’ because it’s interspecies romance. Not sex, even— I keep it rated Teen for the kids out there— just love.”
“But Chewbacca isn’t human,” I said.
“It’s not a question of whether Chewie was human, Holmesy; it’s a question of whether he was a person.” She was almost shouting. She took Star Wars stuff quite seriously. “And he was obviously a person. Like, what even makes you a person? He had a body and a soul and feelings, and he spoke a language, and he was an adult, and if he and Rey were in hot, hairy, communicative love, then let’s just thank God that two consenting, sentient
adults found each other in a dark and broken galaxy.”
So often, nothing could deliver me from fear, but then sometimes, just listening to Daisy did the trick. She’d straightened something inside me, and I no longer felt like I was in a whirlpool or walking an ever-tightening spiral. I didn’t need similes. I was located in my self again. “So he’s a person because he’s sentient?”
“Nobody complains about male humans hooking up with female Twi’leks! Because of course men can choose whatever they want to bone. But a human woman falling in love with a Wookiee, God forbid. I mean, I know I’m just feeding the trolls here, Holmesy, but I can’t stand for it.”
“I just mean, like, a baby isn’t sentient, but a baby is still a person.”
“Nobody is saying anything about babies, Holmesy. This is about one adult person who happened to be human falling in love with another adult person who happened to be a Wookiee.”
“Can Rey even speak Wookiee?”
“You know, it’s a little annoying that you don’t read my fanfic, but what’s really annoying is that you don’t read any Chewie fanfic. If you did, you’d know that Wookiee was not a language, it was a species. There were at least three Wookiee languages. Rey learned Shyriiwook from Wookiees who came to Jakku, but she didn’t usually speak it because Wookiees mostly understood Basic.”
I was laughing. “And why are you using the past tense?”
“Because all of this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Holmesy. You always use the past tense when talking about Star Wars. Duh.”
“Wait, can humans speak Shyri—the Wookiee language?”
Daisy did a very passable Chewbacca impersonation in response, then translated herself. “That was me asking if you’re gonna eat your fries.” I passed the to-go carton across the table to her, and she took a handful, then
made another Chewbacca noise with her mouth half full.
“What did that mean?” I asked her.
“It’s been over twenty-four hours; time to text Davis.”
“Wookiees have texting?”
“Had texting,” she corrected me. (pgs 66, 67, and 68)
I am fascinated and appreciative of the fact that John Green researched online fan fiction well enough to learn some of the discourse (usually very, very bad) around it.
What did teens sound like in 2017? Did they have memes?
I stood up and shook Malik’s hand. “I take care of the tuatara,” he explained. Everyone seemed to assume I knew what the hell a tuatara was. Malik walked over to the edge of the pool, knelt down, lifted a door hidden in the patio’s tile, and pressed a button. A reticulated chrome walkway emerged from the pool’s edge and arched over the water to reach the island. Daisy grabbed my arm and whispered, “Is this real life?” and then the zoologist waved his hand dramatically, gesturing for us to walk across the bridge. (pg 35)
They did!
One tiny misstep that doesn't even really count is one odd line from Daisy.
"Anyway, how are you?” I shrugged. “Want me to keep talking?” I nodded. “You know how sometimes people will say, like, oh, she really loves the sound of her voice? I do seriously love the sound of my voice. I’ve got a voice for radio.” (pg 238)
While "voice for radio" was definitely once a popular phrase, I feel like it's more likely a teen in 2017 would've said she has a voice for podcasts, or at least a voice for audio books.
___________________________________________________________________________
Aza's mother is a high school math teacher, specifically in Aza's high school, and they have an interesting exchange.
“No phones in the hallway, Aza!” I put my phone away and went into her classroom. There were four minutes remaining in my lunch period, which was the perfect length for a Mom conversation. She looked up and must’ve seen something in my eyes. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re not anxious?” she asked. At some point, Dr. Singh had told Mom not to ask if I was feeling anxious, so she’d stopped phrasing it as a direct question.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been taking your meds,” she said. Again, not a direct question.
“Yeah,” I said, which was broadly true. I’d had a bit of a crack-up my freshman year, after which I was prescribed a circular white pill to be taken once daily. I took it, on average, maybe thrice weekly.
“You look ...” Sweaty, is what I knew she meant.
“Who decides when the bells ring?” I asked. “Like, the school bells?”
“You know what, I have no idea. I suppose that’s decided by someone on the superintendent’s staff.”
“Like, why are lunch periods thirty-seven minutes long instead of fifty? Or twenty-two? Or whatever?”
“Your brain seems like a very intense place,” Mom answered.
“It’s just weird, how this is decided by someone I don’t know and then I have to live by it. Like, I live on someone else’s schedule. And I’ve never even met them.”
“Yes, well, in that respect and many others, American high schools do rather resemble prisons.”
My eyes widened. “Oh my God, Mom, you’re so right. The metal detectors. The cinder-block walls.”
“They’re both overcrowded and underfunded,” Mom said. “And both have bells that ring to tell you when to move.”
“And you don’t get to choose when you eat lunch,” I said. “And prisons have power-thirsty, corrupt guards, just like schools have teachers.”
She shot me a look, but then started laughing. (pgs 10, 11, and 12)
American public schools bearing a truly unfortunate likeness to American prisons has been true for many decades. Aza didn't also mention the armed guards.
__________________________________________________________________________
Daisy took out her phone and raised it to her ear. “Hey, Eric. It’s Daisy.
Listen, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got the stomach flu. Could be norovirus.”
“...”
“Yeah, no problem. Sorry again.” She hung up, put her phone in her bag, and said, “If you even imply diarrhea, they tell you to stay home because they’re so scared of outbreaks. Right, okay, we’re doing this. You still got that
canoe?" (pg 18)
We can only hope Aza would've been as okay as possible during the COVID pandemic (which is still going on at the time of this writing, by the way).
I made it to my locker a few minutes early and took a second to look up the reporter Daisy had phished, Adam Bitterley. He’d shared a link that morning to a new story he’d written about a school board voting to ban some book, so I guessed he hadn’t been fired. Daisy was right— nothing happened. (pgs 70 and 71)
This is unfortunately as timely as ever, but also particularly meaningful coming from John Green, who has multiple books that have been banned or at least "challenged" in schools.
________________________________________________________________________________
Aza finds herself drawn to a painting in Davis's father's fine art collection.
I found myself pulled toward the painting that Mychal had called “Pettibon.” It was a colorful spiral, or maybe a multicolored rose, or a whirlpool. By some trick of the curved lines, my eyes got lost in the painting so that I kept having to refocus on tiny individual pieces of it. It didn’t feel like something I was looking at so much as something I was part of. I felt, and then dismissed, an urge to grab the painting off the wall and run away with it.
I jumped a little when Davis placed his hand on the small of my back. “Raymond Pettibon. He’s most famous for his paintings of surfers, but I like his spirals. He was a punk musician before he became an artist. He was in
Black Flag before it was Black Flag.”
“I don’t know what Black Flag is,” I said.
He pulled out his phone and tapped around a bit, and then a screeching wave of sound, complete with a screaming, gravelly voice, filled the room from speakers above. “That’s Black Flag,” he said, then used his phone to
stop the music. “Want to see the theater?” (pg 100)
I was somewhat surprised to see a real artist mentioned, but maybe I shouldn't be.
It's notable that this book features Daisy and Aza regularly dining at Applebee's, the trademarked restaurant, and taking Lexapro, the trademarked medication. Given that in his previous works Green went out of his way not to mention the Make-a-Wish foundation or Wikipedia, this just seemed like an interesting choice.
________________________________
“That reminds me of a story my mom tells,” Daisy said.
“What story?”
I could hear her teeth chattering when she talked but neither of us wanted to stop looking up at the latticed sky. “Okay, so there’s this scientist, and he’s giving a lecture to a huge audience about the history of the earth, and he explains that the earth was formed billions of years ago from a cloud of cosmic dust, and then for a while the earth was very hot, but then it cooled enough for oceans to form. And single-celled life emerged in the oceans, and
then over billions of years, life got more abundant and complex, until two hundred fifty thousand or so years ago, humans evolved, and we started using more advanced tools, and then eventually built spaceships and everything.
“So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, ‘That’s all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’
“The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, ‘Well, but if that’s so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?’
“And the woman says, ‘It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.’
“And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, ‘Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?’
“And the old woman says, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down.’”
I laughed. “It’s turtles all the way down.”
“It’s turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.”
“Because it’s turtles all the way down,” I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation. (pgs 244 and 245)
I sat in one of the backseats in Mychal’s minivan, and as he drove south on Michigan Road, Daisy started playing one of our favorite songs, “You’re the One.” Mychal was laughing as Daisy and I screamed the lyrics to each other. She sang lead, and I belted out the background voice that just repeated, “You’re everything everything everything,” and I felt like I was. You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.
As Daisy switched the song to a romantic ballad that she and Mychal were singing, I started thinking about turtles all the way down. I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is
billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it. (pg 257)
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John Green has mentioned that he's drawn on his own experiences with mental health quite a bit for this book, and in some ways it's his most personal work. In the acknowledgements, there's this:
Lastly, Dr. Joellen Hosler and Dr. Sunil Patel have made my life immeasurably better by providing the kind of high-quality mental health care that unfortunately remains out of reach for too many. My family and I are grateful. If you need mental health services in the United States, please call the SAMHSA treatment referral helpline: 1-877- SAMHSA7. It can be a long and difficult road, but mental illness is treatable. There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t. (Acknowledgments)
I haven't called that number. But I do know that in the United States, even with insurance, it's far easier to get a hold of a gun than it is quality mental health care (you know, that thing conservatives bring up whenever there's a mass shooting).
There's ways around this for the determined, of course, but when you're already in pain (and you might not even be thinking of therapy), they can be simply added work. But still, a hotline is a start.
Please note that if you can't afford therapy/can't get a therapist, you can still check books out both of your public library and read them online about mental health, you can follow therapists on social media, you can join a support group online, you can learn skills to cope and pool them with other folks, there is always something you can do, and that counts as therapy too. We need to make it so that all healthcare (including mental healthcare) is easy, free, and accessible, but in the meantime, we do the best we can.
Final Grade: A
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