It's been a long week and an even longer weekend you guys. Spent most of it sleeping on the cold tiles of my bathroom floor. Can't remember last time I ever felt this sick. And to make matters worse, it's now official, I just cancelled my hotel reservation. I was supposed to get the fuck out of this town for a few days starting next week and now I'm trapped here like a caged animal. There are no words expressing my anger and depression especially when the hotel is still in this country, I wasn't even going to cross the border. I am beyond mad, disappointed and literally just spiraling because I hate this place, utterly hate it, and my only release was leaving it for a few days each year and that's something I haven't been able to do for far too long. There really is nothing more that I could possibly lose this year is there? Can someone give me some idea, time frame, when will the world be normal again? If ever? Because if the reply to that is never then someone please send some arsenic my way because this is not a place or a world I want to live in and this prolonged suffering is pointless.
I went back to re reading a book I love, like I said I just can't commit to new books these days, so I go back to what I know. To what is home. So that's what this is about a book I think is a new modern classic. Or should be anyways. (Spoilers below the pics, consider yourself warned).
I loved John Green before it was ''cool'' to like him, you know with ''The fault in our stars'' which to this day I wonder what just WHAT made John write something so depressing. But then again mostly his books aren't particularly happy. Reading tip? I think my favourite by him is ''Will Grayson, Will Grayson''.
''Turtles all the way down'' is just the same. Not particularly happy I mean. It's basically a story about mental illness (aren't we all right at home there?) and a backdrop of mystery. You know how it goes you got romance, friendship, love and loss. You guys know what turtles all the way down means right? It's an expression of the problem of infinite regress. The saying alludes to the mythological idea of a World Turtle that supports a flat Earth on it's back.
I usually don't get books with hard covers, not many titles make it here with hard covers, nevermind dust jacket. I just love this design, black, with silver lettering on the spine and the embossed lizard on the front cover. And the ''limited edition'' dust jacket with the significant quotes on the inside is pretty cool too.
What made me wonder though is the fact that the main person in this book is a teenager named Aza Holmes, all her other problems aside, she's an introvert (aren't we all?), obsessed with bacteria and transmission of disease. Now Aza is fictional, but I wonder just how many of Aza's are out there and how hard this constant brain washing of wash your hands, wear your mask, don't leave your house must be for them. It's driving me insane and I don't have Aza's OCD.
Wait stop! Didn't John just release a new book? Something about some essays or combined essays or something like that? I remember reading about it. Need to look that up and order it because I don't expect it to show up in bookstores in this third world country. I swear. I fucking swear color tv is a miracle.
Now back to Aza. I was shocked to read about her OCD and how bad it can be, there was a point where she actually drinks hand disinfectant. (Which reminds me of a brand new bottle sitting on my desk ready to be packed. Oh wait, I aint going nowhere. Ugh). The story centers around Aza and her best friend Daisy who decides to investigate the mystery of a missing billionare Russell Pickett whose son Aza went to camp with years before. As they begin to dig into this weird disappearance, Aza reconnects with said son, Davis. Russell went missing under a cloud of fraud and bribery accusations and a 100 000 dollar reward. I mean honestly, who wouldn't want to ''play this kinda game''?
John once said that this is his most personal book. Researching and diving into the world of mental illness which is a major theme in this book but also he was very descriptive, relatable and quite graphic, the way you can read about Aza's thoughts processing and spiraling is really on point and for those that have experience will know it's very realistic. What I like about that though is that it's not romanticized as so many authors like to do, no kissing scars is not cute. Mental illness is ugly and that's what John captured so well, the bad, the ugly, the bad to worse to better again. A rollercoaster as mental illnesses tend to be.
There's a brilliant quote in this book;
''I wanted to tell her that I was getting better because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.''
It's true aint it? People rarely say I have cancer or depression, but so many times you can hear ''I had…''. It should be normalised to a point where it's nothing embarrassing to talk about an illness. Especially a mental illness, you don't see cancer patients aplogising like you do those with depression. Honestly nobody wants it. We all want to be normal.
Now this is a fun thing. The embossed lizard is actually something called a Tuatara. I honestly never heard of them before this book but it would appear it's a rare type of a reptile found only in New Zealand, they are supposed to be the only and last survivors of an order of reptiles that lived in the age of the dinosaurs. So to be fair, that's pretty damn badass. Living dinosaurs. Fun fact I actually love lizards, they're too cute, all kinds from tiny ones to those huge Comodo dragons. So why is the lizard on the front cover? Early in the search for the missing money man Aza develops a crush on his son Davis. That was a little predictable to me but not in an annoying kinda way. Davis is an interesting character, someone with excessive privileges, you know obviously money, huge house with a cinema, swimming pool etc but yet troubled with his own problems. I keep saying money doesn't buy you happiness. It buys you concert tickets and shoes which is close enough but that's not real happiness. So money aside Davis is troubled with the loss of his mother and of course his father disappearing, and this is where the lizard comes in, if said father is dead all his fortune will be left to the reptile. Can you imagine that? I keep saying pets ARE family but come on, leaving everything to a lizard and nothing to the only son (or in this case two sons)? That's just cruel.
It's the flow of the book that makes it really good. It's this sorta predictability, you know a billionare goes missing, he has a mansion that might hide a ton of secrets, then there's a murky river, and all kinds of clues that result into nothing. All that together makes it sorta predictable in which way this story goes. But here's the deal sometime in the middle you realise that despite looking like the point of the book is the mystery it's really not. It's about loss and love and friendship really, but above all it's about Aza's mental health. I actually find it refreshing how many books lately are about mental health and the LGBTQ. Cheers. I love it.
I actually read somewhere, people complaining that is that they can't really relate to John Green's characters because they seem ''too grown up'' and just how stupid is that really? Shouldn't you be happy his characters aren't reduced into dumb kids? Shouldn't you want to read books where teenagers are credited for their inteligence and their problems aren't brushed aside but rather listened to? Especially when it comes to mental health. I want to scream in frustration when people brush it off ''it's all in your head'' well yes, that's what's the problem with mental illness. It's in your head. Of course we should want to read books in which teenagers especially are taken seriously, their hopes, dreams, worries and fears taken seriously and listened to. Kids should always be listened to.
I'm not giving away the ending, if you want to know if the billionare is found or not and all the rest of the questions, read the book, what I will tell you though is despite the humor in it, in theory this is a dark book, you don't really get a perfect happy ending that we all want at the end of a sad story. But what you do get is a very surprising ending and upon thinking, the perfect one for such a story. We are so used of those happy stories about someone that overcame an illness but here we don't get that we get, learning to live with it and by that with yourself and I think that's perfect.
Let me end this with another quote that I just love, probably because it's just as depressive as I feel most of the time;
''The problem with happy endings is that they're either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.''
True. Maybe that's why I normally only read books with happy endings, because I know in real life they don't exist.
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