Turtles All the Way Down by John Green Chapter Review

The Skinny

(aka Back of the Book Summary in a Sentence)

High schoolers Aza and Daisy want to earn a $100,000 reward by tracking down a billionaire fugitive who also happens to be the father of Aza’s childhood friend.

Nutritional Value

(aka What’s Good)

I somehow managed to learn a lot about microbes by reading this chapter. It felt like half of the pages were taken from Wikipedia. Not that I’m complaining. I love Wikipedia. It helped get me through high school.

Legit though, most of this chapter was a lecture on how microbial cells make up fifty percent of the human body. And it makes sense for it to be written this way. John Green was trying to show that Aza is suffering from a mental disorder, most likely OCD. The narrator being preoccupied with the bacteria inside her body was an effectively jarring way to make the reader understand Aza’s thought spirals.

Freezer Burn

(aka What’s Bad)

Ava is the narrator of the story. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl in high school. But she does not sound like one. She sounds like a forty-year-old man in an existential crisis.

And I would know. Background time. Before the whole career change earlier this year, I used to teach English to high school students. I’ve spent years surrounded by teenagers.

Teenagers do not speak like this. Highly educated adults showing off how highly educated they are speak like this.

Lingering Aftertaste

(aka My Prediction)

If I were a gambler, I’d bet a hundred bucks that Ava and Daisy’s friendship will get tested somehow, but they’ll end up mending their relationship in time to find the billionaire fugitive.

Taste Test Verdict

(aka Would I Read More?)

Hard pass. I know how popular John Green is and this book will probably get turned into a movie because that’s what happens to John Green books. But I will neither read the rest of this book nor watch the inevitable movie.

It bothers me that the narrator of the book is supposed to be a teenager, but it sounds nothing like a teenager. If you can only write in the voice of a pretentious adult, then write your narrator as a pretentious adult.

Memorable Morsel

(aka Quotable Quote)

I couldn’t choose between these two gems. And since it’s almost Thanksgiving, the holiday of gluttony, I decided to put both quotes up. To all the teenagers out there, the people who still remember their teenage years, and really anyone who’s ever talked to a teenager, does this sound like a sixteen-year-old to you?

I was eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich and drinking a Dr. Pepper. To be honest, I find the whole process of masticating plants and animals and then shoving them down my esophagus kind of disgusting, so I was trying not to think about the fact that I was eating, which is a form of thinking about it.

AND

I was thinking that if half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn’t that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate? And I fell pretty far down that recursive wormhole until it transported me completely out of the White River High School cafeteria into some non-sensorial place only properly crazy people get to visit.

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