Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

"Turtles All the Way Down" by John Green is the story of Aza, a Junior in high school that lives with invasive thoughts about the microbes in and around her. Along with her invasive thoughts she is also dealing with difficulties with her friends and the beginning of a relationship with a boy she met when they were younger at a camp for kids whose parents had died. And they only got back into contact all these years later because Aza and her best friend Daisy were looking for clues to finding the boys dad because he is a billionaire that had run away before he could be arrested for his various illegal activities (yes, there is a reward involved). I guess you could say things are getting pretty crazy for Aza, and that makes the crazy she was already dealing with even more difficult.

This book was wonderful to read, it is definitely the type of YA fiction that is still enjoyable when you are no longer a teenager. John Green does not write about familiar experiences, most of us do not have an obsession with the microbes in and around us that keeps us from living a regular life. But the way that he writes about what he chooses to write about reminds us of familiar experiences in a way that is individual. If he wrote something too similar to my own life then maybe I wouldn't be able to identify with the story so much, but since his plots are so diverse and interesting we can focus on identifying with the emotion of the stories, not the plots of them.

I have really enjoyed basically every John Green book I have ever read and I love him for it. How this man manages to write such relatable teenage female protagonists I will never understand, but I am a big fan. And the screenshot below is just for fun because "fishingboatproceeds" is John Green's tumblr so having John Green respond to someone roasting John Green is a gem and it makes me laugh :)

I highly recommend this book. I read it in practically one sitting, but I imagine that it would be just as wonderful a read spread out over more time. Or maybe it would be better to read over more time because "Turtles All the Way Down" gave me a bit of a book hangover (open link for a fun post by Epic Reads that describes the affliction) so it was hard to start a new book for a few days. Either way, it's a wonderful book and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did. And if you don't that's ok because we all have different tastes in books, this blog is just me putting my opinions out into the world.

XO, Ellen