Reviews with content warning for Blood - Turtles All the Way Down

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

77 reviews

andramaciuca's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Content Warnings

breedawnwriter's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

John Green will always have a soft spot in my heart. The Fault in Our Stars was my favorite book for so many years because it captured something special and important about being a teenager.

Turtles All the Way Down does the same thing, but extends it to include something special and important about what it’s like to live with a mental illness.

Aza’s story is painful and, at times, heartbreaking to read. But her story is so important.

When you have an unseen diagnosis, it’s so hard to explain it to someone who doesn’t have it. When you have a mental illness, it’s so hard to know if you’re capable of being loved because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of believing that you are simply too annoying, too irritating, too irrational, too hard to love.

And John Green captures every feeling with all the grace, dignity, and humility that I’ve grown to expect from him.

If you know someone who has a mental illness, please read this book. It will shed light on what it’s like in ways most people can’t explain.

If you have a mental illness, please read this book. It will make you feel seen and understood in ways that you didn’t quite know were possible.

5/5 stars with zero hesitation. Thank you, John Green. <3

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katerina_l's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark informative sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

smolone13's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This story was a heart-warming piece on a young girl struggling with relationships and having to find a way around her crippling mental illness that leaves her feeling hopeless and miserable throughout the book along with trying to solve a local mystery.

I would recommend this book to anyone of any age so they can enter the mind of someone who has a mental illness. This truly brought me back to those times that I was struggling myself in high school with anxiety.

Content Warnings

Moderate: Self harm, Car accident, Mental illness, and Panic attacks/disorders

Minor: Suicide, Death of parent, Injury/Injury detail, Blood, Grief, and Cursing

When I picked up this book I thought it was going to be a story full of mystery, however, in good John Green fashion it was way deeper. I have read a number of John Green’s novels, and this is one that I haven’t read. Just like all of John Green’s books, it was a depiction of real emotion and real life. The main character, Aza, is a young girl in high school who quickly shows that she has a severe mental illness that haunts her. Her friend, Daisy, is the complete opposite of her. Daisy loves adventure and trying out new things and can’t completely understand why Aza is the way that she is. They discover that the billionaire in their city was missing and Aza admits that she knows the billionaire’s son. In response, Daisy decides for them that they were going to go over to his house and find the hidden camera that would have detected the billionaire running away from the house. They decide to take a canoe and go to the house and connect to the camera which they managed to find the video and save it. However, they were caught and Daisy decided to smash the boat so that they could have an excuse to see Davis. After seeing Davis, Aza and Davis decided to rekindle their friendship. While trying to rekindle their friendship, Aza and Daisy start looking into researching the disappearance of the billionaire. However, Davis doesn’t want any information found and gives Aza $100k just so she can leave the case be. She splits the money with Daisy but decides that she doesn’t want to stop working on the case. While Daisy is spending her money, Aza is still trying to figure out the case for Davis’s brother. They continue on with life but Aza starts reading Daisy’s fanfiction and quickly discovers that Daisy had created a character that represented Aza that hurt her feelings. She stays quiet for a long while until she and Daisy are going to Applebee’s and Aza starts yelling at Daisy because she is hurt by the accusations which leads to Aza getting into a car accident. After the car accident, Aza has a mental breakdown and ends up on house arrest for a few weeks before going back to school where her relationship with Daisy is healed and they move on with life. Even though Aza wants a relationship with Davis, she also wants to get better so she decides that she doesn’t want to have a relationship. Aza and Daisy go to an art show for their friend and discover that they made it to the last clue Davis’s father had left. After telling Davis, Davis and his brother decide to tell the police and the body is quickly found. This story had a deep connection to me. When I was in high school I had a debilitating anxiety that constantly plagued my mind so to see that written in a book made me feel seen. I could understand every single emotion that was written and I would honestly say that everyone needs to read this book to gain some insight on what it is like to have anxiety.

uss_mary_shelley's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Content Warnings

sarahuwu's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Relaxed read. Sort of emotional. I really appreciate the depiction of mental illness without just magically “getting better.” I’m not blown away by it but I certainly don’t regret having read it.

Content Warnings

infjkiki's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

cateyeschloe's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Wow! I was not expecting to love this book as much as I did.

Oftentimes, YA doesn’t appeal to me as much as other writing styles, and I even more rarely really enjoy romantic subplots. My appreciation for the author as a person is what drove me to finally pick up one of his novels, and I am so happy I chose this one!

Turtles All the Way Down tackles the complexities and intensities of mental illness – like OCD and Anxiety Disorder - and the ways we handle them. John Green is a pro at writing about topics like these in a real-world, lived experience way. It is not romanticized or demonized. It is nuanced and complex, constantly evolving while sometimes feeling suffocating in its stagnation.

Aza often experiences major bouts of anxiety, anxiety attacks, and panic attacks. Numerous times throughout the book she’s asked “What are you afraid of?” and her responses are often all too relatable.

When Aza tells her therapist that she’s scared and her therapist asks what she’s afraid of, Aza responds,

“‘It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.’”

One of the realest sentiments in the novel to me, as someone who lives with anxiety every day, is

“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.”

Aza grapples with derealization, often feeling as though she isn’t actually “real”, as though maybe she’s just an illusion, that intense detachment from reality to the point where your own idea of “self” feels alien and unnatural.

“‘… if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.’”

This is a super relatable and understandable feeling to me, and I found it so refreshing to see these thoughts and feelings laid out in such a crystal clear way. I also really appreciated the sentiments that Aza eventually became comfortable with and accepted toward the close of our story.

“‘You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.’”

The very fact that we worry whether or not we are real is an implication itself that we are, in fact, very real.

This book had a great pace and John Green excels at story-telling and giving you opportunities to relate to and attach to the characters. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for how much he ramped up the emotional weight that was the ending of this novel. It was beautiful, it was heartbreaking, and it was everything I could have asked for. The reality of living with mental illness isn’t a perfect happy ending – it’s surviving it and living alongside it.

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes from the book:

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.”

Content Warnings

judythedreamer's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

John Green is just not for me. He writes amazing philosophical spirals and character portraits but he neglects the story so much that there's little to no enticement to keep the train going.

Content Warnings

jinx_mars's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

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