new john green book

It’s been almost six years since YA uber-author John Green has published a new book (something we wrote about a while back). That’s almost generation’s worth of his target audience – many teen readers will have been too young for his last book, The Fault in Our Stars, when it was published in 2012. The rocket-like success of that book (and subsequent movie) was both a blessing and a curse for Green: his books were being read by millions more people, but that success resulted in a period of crippling anxiety for the author. The expectations for his next book felt so overwhelming, that for a while he could not write at all.

Green has not made a secret of the fact that he’s wrestled with Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder most of his life, and what it’s like to live with mental illness is the overriding theme of Turtles All the Way Down. Aza Holmes, the narrator of the book, struggles mightily to control the obsessive thoughts that often consume her, which she calls “thought spirals” that grow more and more tightly coiled until she is driven to a compulsive behavior to quiet them.

The ostensible plot of the book is a mystery: the famous father of a childhood acquaintance has has skipped town to avoid legal troubles, and Aza’s BFF Daisy is convinced the two of them can figure out where he is and collect the $100,000 reward. TATWD has all the John Green-isms we’ve come to expect: the quirky best friend, the seemingly impossible task, the sweet love story, and everyone’s got a poem or literature quote ready to go at a moment’s notice, (John Green characters are a bit more well-read and well-spoken than the general teen-aged public). But the real journey the reader is taken on is what it’s like to live in a hijacked mind.

Aza has a dread of germs. One of the first compulsions we witness is Aza forcing open a wound on her fingertip, so that she can clean and sanitize it before covering it up with one of her constant supply of band-aids, a ritual she performs so often that the wound never completely heals. Hand sanitizer is used combatively – at one point she even starts drinking it. Aza’s helplessness in the face of these thoughts and compulsions can be painful to read, and there’s no “all better now” resolution at the end – the prevailing takeaway is it’s ok not to be ok sometimes. Green has managed to paint a picture of mental illness that is more matter-of-fact than sensational, and the writing is evocative and mature. It’s a thoughtful novel that will appeal to adults as well as teens, and well worth the six-year wait.

Five stars.

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.