Turtles All the Way Down by John Green | Rating: ★★★★★"True terror isn't being scared; it's not having a choice in the matter."
Years ago, a very good friend of mine (hello, Cynthia!) introduced me to John Green's work by having me read Looking For Alaska. At the time, I was just leaving high school and, for me, this was the perfect time to experience his words for the first time. A lot of bloggers and authors seem to like to criticize John (for some reasons that make sense, for others that... don't) but I remember thinking, as I made my way through the books he'd had under his belt at the time, that the way he wrote teenagers felt real to me.
The fast paced conversation. The wit. The tries at being (or sounding) like adults and succeeding for a moment, only to revert back to sounding infantile. For me, there was something easy to relate to as a teenager when it came down to his dialogue. It was like listening to my friends talk. Or an expression that I longed to write but never could.
One of the most common bits of criticism we see about his writing is that the teenagers he writes have the knack of sounding "too adult" or pretentious. Turtles All the Way Down has garnered some of that same complaint, but I think--I'm not sorry to say this--that people forget that teenagers are at that point between childhood and adulthood. For some of them, this means immaturity and conflict; for others it means something else different.
