REVIEW: Turtles All the Way Down - John Green

• Year first released:  2017
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780525555360
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Penguin Young Readers Group
• My rating (out of 5):  5+

It’s no surprise that I’m a big fan of John Green. That said, I’ll admit up front to perhaps a small bit of bias. If you can forgive me this minor bias, though, and trust me on how incredible Turtles All the Way Down really is - and how you really, really should read it - I hope you'll discover the same sheer magic in it that I did. 

Like all of Green's best books (Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, and the Fault in Our Stars, in order of their release), it'd be easy enough to categorize Turtles as simply a young adult romance, maybe a coming-of-age story (a label I don't really care for because of its overabundant use and yet lack of any inherent meaning, but there you have it). But, like each of those others, Turtles presents us with so much more than "just" a romance, "just" a drama, "just" a young adult book...in fact, it's far beyond "just" anything. 

Turtles wastes no time in diving into the deep end of human struggle. And though its main character Aza is definitely a teenager with teenage emotions and concerns and struggles, we quickly realize that her story is something that touches just about all of us. Almost nothing about Aza is ordinary, per se, and yet she's completely credible as a character, through and through - I might even say that she is Green's strongest, most believable single character to date. Never have we been so deeply invested inside the in's and out's of one of Green's character's minds - the good, the bad, the quirky, the heartache. 

To say much about the plot would certainly give away the magic of reading the book for yourself - a magic which Green establishes within the first few pages. The most I'd dare say is that, after no small amount of pressure from her best friend, Daisy, Aza begins seeking clues about the disappearance of a fugitive billionaire, hoping to claim her stake in the $100,000 reward. Things very quickly complicate from there, and it's not long before we discover that this really isn't about the money or the manhunt at all - it's about how our stories shape us, how we shape our stories, and about the glorious, painful in between: 

Are we simply on the receiving end of our circumstances? Are our stories really our own? Do they shape us, or do we shape them? Are we more than the sum of our parts? Are we even as much as the sum of our parts?

These are not young adult questions - these are human questions, which Green deftly weaves into page after page of Turtles. I'm convinced that you simply cannot read the book without wrestling with these questions for yourself. That's what it left me with, at least, and I'm 32 - about twice as old as Green's target demographic (haha).

If you've read any of his other works, you've no doubt seen Green's nigh-supernatural ability to take a dozen pieces which feel like they're from a dozen different realities, and yet combine them into the most cohesive, relatable package one can imagine. The same is true here - more so, in fact, than he's accomplished previously. 

I'm still too close to Turtles to definitively say if it's better than Paper Towns (my standing favorite of Green's books), but it is absolutely a worthy successor to it, if nothing else. 

If you're waiting for a punch line from me - a disclaimer, a tiny gripe, a "it's-good-but-not-as-good-as...", etc. - there isn't one. Turtles is absolutely a masterpiece, and absolutely once again proves that John Green sits at the pinnacle of modern authors.