Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve been in a bit of a rut with young-adult fiction recently & haven’t found the genre as satisfying to read, but this book did change my mind. (Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading 18-19th century British Literature for six months straight???)
With a topic as sensitive and broad as mental health, I was apprehensive to see how this book would tackle such a subject. But John Green created the character Ava, as well as the sphere of her mind, with such care that I found myself benefiting from the realization Ava was making in her mental health journey. There’s a line where she says “I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me.” and it makes sense.
Most importantly, I am so thankful for how Green treated his characters and the topics in this book. He does not sugar-coat, he does not “dumb-it-down.” Aza’s problems are real, her struggles are difficult, and the journey she goes on is relentless. Just because she is a young adult, her problems are not presented as “young” they are presented as real, but more so, they are presented as something Aza can deal with, that it isn’t a hopeless battle.