The story centered on Holmesy, who thinks as if she has been alienated with herself, as if there is “her other self” and thought that her life was being plotted already- a story riddled with plot holes. Her maddeningly descriptive thoughts overdrives her to do silly things like pressing her thumbnail against her fingertip few times a day, just to convince herself that she’s real. Her anxiety problem coupled with panic attacks formed like a spiral, following it inward, never actually ends, it just keeps tightening, infinitely. Fortunately, as Davis was put in the picture, seems to disentangle a bit. They both explore to know the deeper meaning of their lives. Her, on facing her battle against her illness and him, on facing consequences of the puzzling notes left behind by his father. 

Rating: 5/5

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I love how John Green’s identify and put names to his characters. The name, Holmesy, itself, is distinct. I could relate to her introversion. Like, she usually don’t want to highlight herself but, just on the corner thinking out loud. So loud that sometimes it was frustratingly exaggerated: that she’s just human with skin-encased bacterial colony, living and breeding inside her, amid the dreamingly kiss between Davis, was her thoughts of exchanging microbes, billion of them and she just need to go out, and check it, she’s always thinking of having Clostridium difficile like a mad!

Davis on the other hand, made me believed on love, that with hope, someone like him, might is existing around me. I can’t help but to be even more smitten by the book and with conviction, told myself “I should finished it”.

“There was something sweetly shy about the way he looked at me, glancing at, and then away from, my face. Everyone always celebrates the easy attractiveness of green or blue eyes, but there was a depth to Davis’s brown eyes that you just don’t get from lighter colors, and the way he looked at me made me feel like there was something worthwhile in the brown of my eyes, too.”

He’s not so good with small talk, but when he started to chat, hmm. Incantations!

“At this point I don’t care why someone likes me. I’m just so goddamned lonely. I know that’s pathetic. But yeah. I’m lying in a sand trap of my dad’s golf course looking at the sky. I had kind of a shitty day. Sorry for all these texts.

 I told you I was bad at chitchat. Right. That’s how you start a conversation. Hi.”

…

I love how poetic he is, how he creatively construct passages out of the quotations he favoured ,“I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that’s what life is like.”, and speaking of which, he BLOGS!

Even though he didn’t contribute much to the noise of social media, he appeared anonymously with astonishing ideas.

I love how they suit each other, their deep conversation, nuances, euphemisms- they complement each other like two fitted puzzles.

On the other hand, Daisy was such a bang!

She doesn’t only portrayed a writer on her fandom website about Star Wars, but, interestingly the bridge between the two. The first to confess to Davis that Holmesy has a crush on him. The excited “assumed” investigator of their quest on searching Davis Sr. the one who untirelessly thrown jokes:

 “Can I get a charge off your computer BTW?” She actually said the letters B-T-W, which I wanted to point out required more syllables than just saying “by the way,” but she was clearly locked into something.”

“You know this river is the only reason Indianapolis even exists?” Daisy said. She turned around in the canoe to face me. “So, like, Indiana had just become a state, and they wanted to build a new city for the state capital, so everybody’s debating where it should be. The obvious compromise is to put it in the middle. So these dudes are looking at a map of their new state and they notice there is a river right here, smack in the center of the state, and they’re like—boom—perfect place for our capital, because it’s 1819 or whatever, and you need water to be a real city.

 So they announce, we’re gonna build a new city! On a river! And we’re gonna be clever and call it Indiana-polis! And it’s only after they make the announcement that they notice the White River is, like, six inches deep, and you can’t float a kayak down it, let alone a steamship. For a while, Indianapolis was the largest city in the world not on a navigable waterway.”

This novel also bound with the little giant sentimental value of things and animals.

You will adore Harold, the car:

“Maybe you’ve been in love. I mean real love, the kind my grandmother used to describe by quoting the apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the love that is kind and patient, that does not envy or boast, that beareth all things and believeth all things and endureth all things. I don’t like to throw the L-word around; it’s too good and rare a feeling to cheapen with overuse. You can live a good life without ever knowing real love, of the Corinthians variety, but I was fortunate to have found it with Harold. He was a sixteen-year-old Toyota Corolla with a paint color called Mystic Teal Mica and an engine that clanked in a steady rhythm like the beating of his immaculate metallic heart.”

And even to this animal that Davis Sr. left ALL HIS PROPERTIES (rather that to his sons):

“This is a tuatara cell. As far as we can tell, tuatara haven’t changed much in the last two hundred million years, okay? They look the same as their fossils. And tuatara do everything slowly. They mature slowly—they don’t stop growing until they’re thirty. They reproduce slowly—they lay eggs only once every four years. They have a very slow metabolism. But despite doing everything slowly and having not changed much in two hundred million years, tuatara have a faster rate of molecular mutation than any other known animal.”

I was lost on reading the book that, I’m not yet prepared to end my escape on there.

The ending keeps me hope for a sequel, and yeah-

With a tear.

Find it now and read!

Favorite highlighted passages:

•Davis was right: Everybody disappears eventually.

•Your now is not your forever.

•You know what light-time is?” “Kinda,” I said. “It means if we were traveling at the speed of light, it would take us forty-five minutes to get from Earth to Jupiter, so the Jupiter we’re seeing right now is actually Jupiter forty-five minutes ago.

•How can you be anything to yourself? I mean, if you can be something to yourself, then your self isn’t, like, singular.” “You’re deflecting.” I just stared at her. “You’re right that self isn’t simple, Aza. Maybe it’s not even singular. Self is a plurality, but pluralities can also be integrated, right? Think of a rainbow. It’s one arc of light, but also seven differently colored arcs of light.”

•One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.”

•“I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’

•And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.”

•It hurt, all the time, in a way language could not touch. It was boring. It was predictable. Like walking a maze you know has no solution. It’s easy enough to say what it was like, but impossible to say what it was.

•Sometimes you happen across a brilliant run of radio songs, where each time one station goes to commercial, you scan to another that has just started to play a song you love but had almost forgotten about, a song you never would’ve picked but that turns out to be perfect for shouting along to. 

•True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.

•When observation fails to align with a truth, what do you trust—your senses or your truth? The Greeks didn’t even have a word for blue. The color didn’t exist to them. Couldn’t see it without a word for it. 

•Sleep tight, ya morons.”—J. D. SALINGER I think this is good-bye, my friends, although, then again: No one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.

•I thought about him asking me if I’d ever been in love. It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love. And I wanted to tell him that even though I’d never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere. When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. And I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something I couldn’t describe before, created a form for it, but I couldn’t figure out how to say any of that out loud.

•What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.”

•“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.” —ROBERT FROST

•“Even the silence / has a story to tell you.”

•You’d think solving mysteries would bring you closure, that closing the loop would comfort and quiet your mind. But it never does. The truth always disappoints.

•You serve whatever you worship

•The problem with happy endings,” I said, “is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”

 •No, it’s not, Holmesy. You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t choose what’s in the picture, but you decide on the frame.”