Turtles All the Way Down . . . an important read

I just spent a rainy, windy weekend curled up with the new John Green book, Turtles All the Way Down.  I came to the end believing that this is an important book that needs to be on teacher book shelves and book talked to every class.

We all know that more and more kids are living with some kind of mental health concern -- depression, anxiety, and OCD to name a few.  According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 20% of youths are living with a mental health concern.  These youth are at risk; 50% of students with mental illness drop out of high school, many attempt and are successful at suicide (90% of suicides have an underlying mental health issue, and suicide is the third leading cause of death in 10-24 year olds), and 70% of the youth in juvenile justice have mental health issues.  These are serious problems that need attention and serious consideration.

Turtles All the Way Down attempts to show us all what it might be like to live with a chronic anxiety disorder.  Many students will recognize Aza, the protagonist; she struggles with OCD and anxiety.  She is so fixated on the germs that may invade her body that she even cleans her mouth with hand sanitizer after kissing a boy.  Her best friend finds her difficult to deal with, saying that she is "like mustard.  Great in small quantities, but then a lot of [her] is . . a lot" (Green 215).  Aza even struggles with believing the realness of her existence.  She says:  "It's like, when I look into myself, there's no actual me -- just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances.  And a lot of them just don't feel like they're mine.  They're not things I want to think or do or whatever" (244).  Aza voices feelings and thoughts that so many students have trapped inside their heads.

The beautiful thing about this book is that Aza's mental health issues are not neatly solved by the end, but instead shows that she can overcome them to find happiness, friends, and love in the long run. Green acknowledges that Aza will build a successful life; she will "go to college, find a job, make a life, see it unbuilt and rebuilt" (285), all while struggling with her mental health.  This could provide hope for students who are struggling to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

The spirals on the cover are referenced regularly throughout the book.  The book alludes to many poems by Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare among others, but the recurring reference is "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats.  The poem states that, "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer,"; the protagonists of the novel believe that the gyre does not widen.  In fact, the gyre shrinks until it is nearly suffocating.  The gyre, the spiral, is the mental health struggles that can be so debilitating.

The book is  partly sold as a quest to find a missing billionaire, and the plot does circle around that journey.  That journey leads to Aza reconnecting with Davis, the billionaire's son she met years prior at Sad Camp, her name for the camp she went to for kids with deceased parents (her father is dead, as is Davis's mother).  A huge part of the story is how Aza and Davis interact, the insecurities each has, and how those insecurities both pull them together and push them apart. Ultimately, however, the quest for Aza is internal and not external.  The reader gets resolution on what happened to the rich billionaire, but  that feels secondary to the resolution of Aza's quest to understand herself.

This is a book that will stay with me awhile and one I will come back to.  There's a realness to the characters that resonates.  As a teacher and a parent, I reflect on those harrowing statistics about students and mental health and the dire consequences if it all goes unrecognized, minimized, and untreated.  Turtles All the Way Down is a reminder for all of us who care for children that sometimes there is so much more going on with kids than what we can see, and that often, teenagers will never tell us honestly what is on their minds.  For that reason alone, I would recommend this book to students, so they can feel a little less alone, a little less scared, and a little more hopeful.