Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

What time is it? Shit, did I miss the alarm? Is Hannah still in her kennel? Oh, no, she's been in there for ten hours. She's going to hate me. Did she have an accident? Is this going to set her behind in her training? How will she show me that she hates me.  Maybe she'll never listen to me again.  I shouldn't have slept so long.  Wait. Is that the alarm now? Did I set it last night?  Is Dr. BB awake?  Shit, where is he? Is he okay? Did he have an accident? Is he dead downstairs? Is Zelda eating him? How long before a cat would start eating a dead body? What would she start with? His fingers? His eyes?  Would Hannah start barking at her? Oh, no. What if Dr. BB let Hannah out of her kennel before he died? Would she start eating him?  Would she eat Zelda?

This is what my brain is like.  All the time.  From the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep, except for those times when I'm reading, writing, or focusing with my whole brain on not falling over in a standing split during yoga. Constant thoughts. Constant worst case scenarios. Constant circles round and round.  

So guess what I don't want to read right now? A story about a girl who has anxiety and obsessive thoughts. It was just a little too much for me right now. So maybe Turtles All the Way Down by John Green could be a book I might have had a different impression of if I'd read it three months ago. I think it was a fair representation of what it's like to have intrusive thoughts, but I don't need that right now. I just don't.  (Especially since the character's intrusive thoughts have to do with getting an illness...) 2020 is not the time for me to be reading real life representations of my real life mental illness.

But let's set that aside. John Green. Why don't I like John Green the way everyone else does?  I mean, he's absolutely beloved, right?  But with the exception of the cheesefest that was The Fault in Our Stars, every book I've ever read of his has underwhelmed me. This book was no exception.  

Consider this: "...beneath fluorescent cylinders spewing aggressively artificial light..." (page 2)

And this: ""Holmesy, don't take this the wrong way, but you look like you just got off work from your job playing a ghoul at a haunted house, and now you're in a parking lot trying to score some meth."" (page 196-197)

His writing is just so OVERWROUGHT.  No teenager talks like that. No teenager would describe fluorescent lights that way.  Even a precocious teenager and there's nothing here to indicate that anyone in this novel is particularly advanced or anything. It's just overdone and terrible.

And let's not get into one of my least favorite tropes of all time when a boy just happens to fall in love with this delightfully mentally ill girl and he just pretends it's all going to be fine and he'll be able to deal with it, but of course he can't because the girl doesn't actually share just how sick she is and it's not like he can just FIX her.  I. Just. Can't. Right. Now.

This book had so much potential.  But it's possible that John Green is just not the author for me.  Sorry, fangirls, but I'm going to stick with Sarah Dessen for my tearjerkers and moral telling young adult literature.

This is a tuatara.  It's a ridiculous part of the book that sent me down a path of trying to figure out exactly what Green was saying about life and death, but I never did figure it out.  But there you go. It's not a lizard, not a dinosaur, I guess.  I don't know. It's basically a living fossil that can liver for over a hundred years.