Turtles All The Way Down Summary
Turtles All The Way Down By John Green
Setting
The novel is set in Indianapolis, Indiana’s capital city.
Main Characters
Aza Holmes- she is the sixteen-year-old protagonist of the novel who has struggled for most of her life with anxiety and OCD.
Daisy- she is Aza's best friend. Daisy is bubbly, outgoing, and absolutely loves boys and Star Wars.
Davis Pickett Jr. - he is Aza's love interest. David comes from a very wealthy family; his father owns the largest engineering firm in Indianapolis.
Mom- she is Aza's mother who is a math teacher at Aza's high school and is a widow
Davis Pickett, Sr. - he is one of the most successful businessmen in Indianapolis,
Mychal- he is Daisy’s and Aza’a’s friend and classmate and daisy’s boyfriend for a short while.
Noah- he is the younger brother to Davis who is thirteen and still believes that his dad, Mr. Pickett, loves him, and he becomes depressed and starts acting out after his father disappears.
Dr. Singh- is Aza's therapist who uses both cognitive behavioral therapy and medication to help control Aza's anxiety and OCD.
Dad- he is Aza's father, who presumably died of a heart attack while mowing the lawn about eight years prior to the start of the novel.
Tua- she is Davis Pickett Sr.'s female tuatara, a very primitive species of reptile.
Ayala- she is a character in Daisy's Chewbacca fan fiction stories. Ayala is modeled after Aza and shares her worrying personality.
Plot Summary
Aza is a 16-year-old high school student who lives in Indianapolis. She is obsessed with the thought of bacteria invading her body and killing her, so she cuts open a small callus on her finger and cleans it with hand sanitizer. This relieves some of her anxiety but must be repeated many times throughout the day. One day during lunch, Aza’s friends Daisy and Mychal talk about a missing businessman. The man fled to avoid arrest for fraud and bribery regarding a sewer project. Daisy wants Aza to contact the son of the missing man because she needs money for college but Aza rejects that idea. She does not want anything to do with it because she had known the son before and has no interest in reconnecting with him now since he was always so weird when they were younger.
Aza and Daisy visit Davis to find out what happened with Russell, but they do not get any answers. They leave, but Aza and Davis start texting each other. As time passes by, Aza does not worry about her finger as much. However, she gets very upset when she forgets to clean it after a while. Aza starts dating Davis, something that she had not planned for at first, but soon finds herself attracted to him despite his wealth issues. He gives her $100k in cash: if she keeps seeing him he will know that she is not interested in him for his money but because of who he is as a person rather than how rich he is.
Aza cares about Davis, but her panic attacks are more frequent than ever. When she kisses him, all she can think about is how his germs have made her sick and that she wants to stop seeing him. However, Davis understands Aza’s condition and is willing to wait for them to be together in a romantic way. Daisy is unhappy with the fact that Aza has so much control over the $100,000; however, Daisy doesn’t say anything because of their friendship.
Daisy and Aza do not get to see each other as often. Aza wants to make it up to Daisy, so she reads her blog and writes a comment on one of her posts. When Aza visits the blog, she discovers that Daisy based a character on her, a character riddled with anxiety. The character is how Daisy deals with being friends with someone like Aza who is always worried about germs. They fight over the issue since they both care about each other but cannot help their differences in personality. Eventually, they realize that there are more important things in life than worrying about germs all the time; however, neither of them knows what those things are exactly yet.
Meanwhile, Daisy apologizes to Aza for her outburst and Aza apologizes for being selfish. The pair attends Mychal’s art show when Aza gets out of the hospital. They walk through the sewer system, which gives Aza an idea. She worries that Russell is in the sewers somewhere because he could not complete his project. She tells Davis about her theory and he believes her, fearing that his father is dead. One day, Aza finds out that Russell is found dead in the sewer system. Devastated, Davis moves with his brother to Colorado where they have no inheritance because everything goes to Russell’s pet lizard following a will written by their father before he died. With Davis gone, Aza can now focus on keeping well again and moving on with life as best she can without him there anymore either physically or mentally.
Themes
- Identity, and Mental Illness
Rather than simply questioning who she is, Aza is consumed by more fundamental and heady questions about whether she exists at all and how much control, if any, she has over her own thoughts, actions, or circumstances.
- Chaos vs. Order and Control
Simply by nature of Aza's mental illness, she is extremely interested in making order out of the chaotic situations in which she finds herself.
- Language and Meaning
All the characters in Turtles All the Way Down are intensely interested in the English language. The characters are also interested in the mechanics of language itself. They ask questions about parts of speech and sentence structure.