A New Book by John Green (finally!)

New York Times bestselling author, vlogger, movie producer, do-gooder. A man with many hats, but a pretty simple name: John Green.

If you read YA fiction, you already know this guy. Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, and the meteorically popular The Fault in Our Stars – it can be hard to find these books on our shelves because they’re constantly checked out. And he hasn’t written a new book in five long years. Finally it was announced that a new John Green book, Turtles All the Way Down, would be released October 10, 2017.

Why the long drought since 2012’s The Fault in Our Stars? One reason is he was involved in the film adaptations of both TFIOS and his earlier book, Paper Towns. He’s also involved in multiple online projects. He’s the frontman for the Mental Floss and Crash Course YouTube channels, co-creator of VidCon, (an annual conference for the online video community in that takes place every year in the Los Angeles area), and heads the Project for Awesome, a project in which YouTubers dedicate two days to make videos promoting charities or non-profit organizations.

Not to mention the online project that started it all, a little something called Vlogbrothers. John and his brother, Hank, started the project as an experiment on YouTube back in 2007 with an experiment to only talk to each other via video blogs for a year. This lasted from January 1 until December 31, but they’ve continued posting to the vlog twice every week, and have over 3 MILLION subscribers. The Vlogbrothers channel was the first in what would become a larger network of YouTube channels created and developed by the Green brothers, creating a flourishing community of fans known individually as Nerdfighters, with the motto DFTBA (Don’t Forget To Be Awesome).

Add in that he has two young childen, and one can see that it might have been challenging to find the time to write recently. About his new book, he’s said: “This is my first attempt to write directly about the kind of mental illness that has affected my life since childhood, so while the story is fictional, it is also quite personal”. Green has talked about dealing with OCD and anxiety in his own life, and in the new book , 16-year-old Aza Holmes grapples with mental illness as she investigates the disappearance of a billionaire.