Teenage fiction subjectively is and always has been a bit awkward. Various stories about 16-17 year olds falling in love, going on adventures and solving murders is… an interesting premise, but at the end of the day they’re written by a 40 year old trying to remember what puberty feels like while locked in a dank room, or as we like to call them, writers. Turtles All The Way Down by slightly unnerving 40 year old John Green is surprisingly no different, as he writes in the perspective of 16 year old girl Aza Holmes. Aside from one quality (which we’ll get to later), this is your typical teenage fiction. Aza falls in love, goes on an adventure and solves the mystery of a missing billionaire. John Green could leave it there, creating a charming yet mediocre story about love and death and whatever, but there’s one key difference that makes it stand out.

Aza has obsessive compulsive disorder. As does John Green. Not only is this a personal self-reflection for John Green and his experiences with OCD, but it is also a great self-reflection for me, as I too have OCD. What, a review becoming personal? This is insane! But I digress.

So from my perspective of a sufferer of OCD, Green has captured the horrifying qualities of being a little bit screwed up in the brain quite well. Obviously, OCD varies from person to person, but the main gist of it is that alarming thoughts cause unusual actions. These thoughts usually come from a train of thought and weird word association games that you play with yourself. Let’s take a trip down one of these trains of thoughts with me. Let’s take the word flowers. I’m not sure what you think when you see the word flowers, but I think of bouquets. What are bouquets? A collection of flowers. Dead flowers. Dead. Dead. Dead. And that thought rings through your head until (a) you distract yourself, (b) your tear ducts run dry or (c) you kill yourself due to the thoughts. As you can see, not fun. Aza is a very clean person due to a fear of rare diseases, namely c. diff that can be transmitted through whatever, and thus leads her to become mentally unstable and wash hands an abnormal amount of times and drink a bottle of alcoholic hand wash. You know, the usual.

This book also features a couple quirky references due to John Green being a massive nerd. Aza’s best friend writes Star Wars fan fiction, there’s a tuatara (a weird lizard) and somehow those two little things become main plot devices. So if you’re interested in OCD and how it works, or you’re curious about how a wookie loves, read Turtles All The Way Down.

3.5/5