Rating: 5/5
Opening Line: “At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time- between 12.37p.m. and 1.14p.m.- by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them.”
Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old Aza never intended to pursue the mystery of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward at stake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate. So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them from Russell Pickett’s son, Davis.
Aza is trying. She is trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, and maybe even a good detective, while also living within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thought.
Review: When I first read the synopsis for this book I was scared. John Green is my favorite author and this synopsis looked confusing, all over the place, and not really interesting. Either way I placed my pre-order on book depository (which ended up not coming and I had to get it somewhere else. Whatever). I ended up getting the book later than I was supposed to and all the reviews I was seeing were really good. Everyone was loving this and talking about how good the OCD representation is. I got really excited but quickly deflated my excitement to avoid being disappointed.
I was not disappointed.
I wasn’t sure what place this book would occupy on my ~John Green scale~ but when I finished it it became my favorite book by him. The list stands like this:
- Turtles all the way down
- The fault in our stars
- Looking for alaska
- Will Grayson, Will Grayson
- An Abundance of Katherines
- Let it snow (does it count? it counts…)
The thing I’ve thought about recently is: I’m not sure if everyone will like this book. I have a friend that loves TFIOS but it’s mostly because of the romance and I’m not sure how much she’ll like this one because the romance isn’t a really important part of this book. There is romance but there are bigger things in this book like friendship, OCD, recovery, and a bit of mystery.
Also don’t go into this book thinking this is a whimsy mystery thing because it’s not. The big mystery in this book is not a big part in the book.
The most important subject in the book is, very appropriately, our main character and her inside struggle. I say appropriately because everyone else in this book sees our main character Aza as being self-absorbed. Not because she can’t see past her own ass but because she can’t get away from her thoughts.
I really relate to this main character. I used to go to a psychologist a few years ago and something my psychologist told me was that my impulses could very much develop into some kind of OCD in the future. I never thought much about it, and I’m aware that maybe this is me being a bit of a hypochondriac, until I read this book.
The intrusive thoughts the main character deals with are something I deal with so often. It’s what I deal with when I’m trying to sleep at night that makes me keep my phone next to my pillow in order to have an escape, to distract myself. A problem I had with these thought spirals was that they were really hard to get through. In the beginning I just felt so disgusted (like really felt sick, like I could vomit) with the thoughts Aza has about microbes and C. diff . I really could barely get past the first chapter without feeling immensely dizzy. Also the thoughts and process behind why Aza has and keeps that band-aid made me feel so bad in my own wounds. I really don’t know how to describe it. At the end I could only think about: 1. The power words have on you physically; 2. How this is what John Green wanted. He wanted us to feel disgusted, to see how bad it is.
Let’s go into some SPOILERS
Let’s talk about the mystery in this book. I kind of feel like it was used as a way to connect Aza with the love interest, Davis, who is the sun of the missing billionaire. I wasn’t expecting the outcome of the mystery, so much so that when it came I didn’t understand what was happening and had to read the scene more than once (maybe more than twice). Don’t get me wrong, the reveal isn’t something big or a huge plot twist, it’s more on the level of “Paper Towns”, but it wasn’t something I was expecting. When Aza started saying the smell was getting worse, I didn’t think anything of it. When she finally understood what the jogger’s mouth was I was like “okay, so what now? where is he? he left the country??” but they’d basically closed up the mystery and I was really confused until I finally understood…the smell…is a corpse.
My reaction was: Oh.
I felt so bad for Noah and Davis then. I never considered this outcome. I thought they’d just get a small sign of where he was at the end, or that he’d come back for his children, or that we’d never figure out what happened. But nope.
The person Aza is being a ~detective~with is her best friend Daisy. I really like Daisy in the beginning, and I even related to her when she was being horrible at times. I understand how she feels about her friendship being one-sided. I do think way to many things that she said were unnecessary, specially because she repeated them so many times. What I could not deal with (and did not relate with) about Daisy was what she did on her fanfiction. I couldn’t believe the horrible things she’d written about Aza in form of one of her characters. Even when she said she’d only started doing that in 7th grade when she was angry, she kept doing it and kept writing horrible things that made Aza seem like a huge burden and nothing else. And then you have the car crash. I could not believe Daisy had left the hospital. If I had been a part of why my best friend was in a hospital bed I would have never left.
All bad things aside I really enjoy that Aza is trying to be less self-absorbed with Daisy, cause I really understand both sides. I also love that we know they’ll be friends way into adulthood and that Aza didn’t shut herself out from having something as important as friendship in her life.
Also, on the topic of friends, Mychal was horrible for saying that thing about mustard. What a dick head.
Now let’s talk about the romance. I really loved Davis and Aza’s chemistry and how they interacted but if you’ve read John Green you know that if everything is going great in the romance department by the middle of the book, it’s going to end badly. When Aza started freaking out about kissing, I thought maybe she and Davis were going to find a way around it but they didn’t. Aza couldn’t deal with a face to face relationship and Davis couldn’t deal with a “long distance but not really cause they live in the same town relationship”. So it was over and I was upset. I’m hoping the end of the book means they eventually found they’re way back to each other, but knowing John Green, we’ll never know.
Speaking of the ending, the ending broke my heart. When she and Davis were just laying there and the perspective started to change and you finally realize that the narrator is adult Aza and she is almost telling her younger self how her life will go, how many ups and downs it’ll have, I just started crying.
End of Spoilers
As you know I loved this book, but don’t go into it expecting an amazing mystery or a big romantic plot line.
barbara xx
Opening Line: “The day begins in the middle of the night.”
bookish barbara 