Plot: Aza is stuck inside her mind, and it is not friendly territory. Why would it be, if she, like the rest of us, are mere receptacles for billions of bacteria to propagate. She is not a person, she is a country or a planet. A non-sentient thing moving through the world with her movements and thoughts and actions compelled in some way by the bacteria or some other thing, but never her own. That’s hard enough as it is, but is made all the more complicated when her best friend and human Energizer bunny Daisy finds out that a boy Aza had been friends with a few years prior was the son of a billionaire who had gone missing, and that police would pay generously for any tips leading to his arrest. What is a colony of bacteria with unknown motivations supposed to do? Well, it must figure it out. Shenanigans ensue.
Being inside of Aza’s mind is, as you might imagine, a difficult experience. I am always impressed by authors who are able to craft not just believable characters, but characters that ring true in some deep way that is harder to explain than just “fleshed out”. Aza and Daisy are very much teenaged girls, and John Green is very much not, nor has he (to my knowledge), ever been a teenaged girl. It gives me hope for humanity that a person can so fully step into the shoes of a person they have not been, even if there are other similarities for them to lean on (such as, in this case, Aza’s struggles with OCD). I will say that the drama with the billionaire on the run is obviously more of an attention puller than a meaningful part of the story, and likely could have been swapped out for any number of other vehicles, but it is very well used all the same.
