Turtles All the Way Down

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, 286 pages

From the outset, it's obvious that Aza Holmes is not your stereotypical teenage girl. Even while her chatterbox best friend Daisy talks to her about school, boys, work, Star Wars fanfic, and everything else, Aza is trapped inside her own head, worrying about the microbes that are in her stomach, or in the perpetual cut on her callused finger. She tries to be a "normal" kid though: she starts dating Davis (an insanely rich kid whose father disappeared just as his arrest for a white collar crime), she hangs out at Applebee's, she sings along to pop songs while driving her beat-up Toyota.

Plot-wise, it doesn't seem like much happens in this book, though that's probably because so much happens in Aza's head. We, like she, are caught in her thoughts as they spiral tighter and tighter, affecting her physically and emotionally. While the secondary characters are a bit two-dimensional, I'm OK with that because that's kinda how Aza sees them, since she has SO MUCH to deal with just to maintain appearances of a normal life. For those of us who have anxiety, there's a lot we can identify with, even if we don't share Aza's particular intrusive worries. It's a great book, not just to read, but to simply have around.