i know i am a 29-year-old. i know this is a young adult book. BUT!!!! John Green you're better than this. soooo much of the dialogue in this book had me thinking, "can you believe this is just a normal average sentence in this totally real book.” i really think this book contains some terrible overwrought pretentious writing. i know a lot of people love John Green for his writing. and i can say that i am not one of those people. if the plot of this story was better i could've gotten over his writing. but the two together!! just nope. nothing makes and then we'll all be dead somebody ( )

Mystery

John Green's best yet. Read it in one big gulp. Great characters, sympathetically drawn. Just loved it. ( )

3.5. This was a quick read and a really excellent and nuanced, if gut-wrenching portrayal of mental illness. Folks who experience anxiety or OCD, please look after yourself while reading this book; I am prone to anxious thought patterns and found this book a distressing read at times.

John Green is such a cerebral storyteller that the text of his novels spend a lot of time commenting on the themes of previous novels, and Turtles All the Way Down is definitely a Green novel in that regard, with a lot to say about previous books such as Paper Towns and about YA storytelling in general. I'd like to see him move on (as he did, sort of, with The Fault in our Stars), but the result here was still a solid book. The book also features trademark Green-ian characters, like Aza's self-assured, fan fiction-writing best friend Daisy (who I adored) and philosophical maybe-love interest Davis (who I found dull as nails).

As always, Green's strengths are his boundless curiosity about everything and his boosterism of teens and youth culture. As an advocate and mentor for this age group, he is perhaps without equal. And as a crossover writer with an adult fanbase, writing during a time when youth culture is particularly demonized, I applaud him for spreading the word that the kids these days are alright, even when they're struggling.

ETA: I will defend to the death Green's characters' right to have super philosophical conversations, because that was my lived high school experience, even without 2017 Wikipedia at our fingertips. ( )

gave it four stars right after i finished but i read a few reviews that made good points so i bumped it down to three.

i thought this book would focus more on Pickett’s disappearance, but it didn’t and so now i’m questioning the reason for that plot line… i feel like everything that happened with Aza and Davis could have happened without his dad being missing. same with Aza’s acquaintance with Noah. perhaps their dad could just be neglectful rather than literally gone and those conversations and stuff could’ve still happened.

i saw a lot of people complain about the amount of philosophical details but i personally enjoy that kind of stuff so i wasn’t bothered by it. ( )