But, because the book is in first person and we are always in Aza’s head, we know that even when she is having fun the worries are there. You know, like your normal, average, high school kid. Aza is kid who has friends and watches Star Wars and hangs out with billionaires’ sons trying to solve mysteries. She laughs at her own issues, she thinks about where she will go to college, she annoys the Applebee’s waitress with her obnoxious number of coupons. I really appreciated how despite everything, she is just so human. Overwhelmingly a positive and deeply relatable experience, but still, reading something that nails the patterns of your brain so spot on is a bit eerie. The experience of reading the book as someone who has similar experiences every day was…weird? Unsettling? Cathartic? Amazing? Uncomfortable? Probably all of those things. And yes, of course a great deal of it has to do with the fact that we share the same anxiety disorder. I am a total nerd, I’ve related to lots of characters in the time I’ve spent consuming media, but few have hit me like Aza Holmes. It is less common that you read a book and feel like the author has performed invasive surgery to examine your brain as writing research. Sometimes you read a book and relate to a character. We are not reading about her spiraling, self-destructive, anxiety, we are inside of it, in a completely immersive experience. The thing that I was most deeply moved by is the accuracy with which Aza’s OCD is written. Then there’s more plot and lots of metaphors and poetic stuff about Chewbacca, go read the book.

Aza was once friends with his son, and they reconnect. Aza’s best friend, and polar opposite, Daisy wants to try and find this missing rich guy, because of the reward the police are offering. Aza’s Brain and The Mystery of The Disappearing Billionaire. There are kind of two plots happening at once.

If you haven’t read the it, the story basically goes like this.

Wealthy Tuaturas! Star Wars Fanfiction! Painting Theft! There are so many good things I can say about this book. It’s getting sucked into a whirlpool that shrinks and shrinks and shrinks your world until you’re just spinning without moving, stuck inside a prison cell that is exactly the size of you, until eventually you realize that you’re not actually in a prison cell. ‘”But the really scary thing is not turning and turning in the widening gyre’ it’s turning and turning in the tightening gyre. Summary: We follow the mystery of missing billionaire, Russell Picket, through the eyes of young Aza Holmes, struggling keep herself afloat in the stifling grasp of intense anxiety.

Aza turtles all the way down