INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALISTNBCC JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FINALISTONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST’S MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017ONE OF NPR’S ‘GREAT READS’ OF 2017A USA TODAY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR AN AMAZON.COM BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A BUSINESS INSIDER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR“Impossible to put down.” —NPR“A novel that readers … YEAR
A BUSINESS INSIDER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“Impossible to put down.” —NPR
“A novel that readers will gulp down, gasping.” —The Washington Post
“The word ‘masterpiece’ has been cheapened by too many blurbs, but My Absolute Darling absolutely is one.” —Stephen King
A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl’s heart-stopping fight for her own soul.
Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of her mother, in the thrall of her tortured and charismatic father, Martin. Her social existence is confined to the middle school (where she fends off the interest of anyone, student or teacher, who might penetrate her shell) and to her life with her father.
Then Turtle meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes, lives in a big clean house, and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first time, the larger world begins to come into focus: her life with Martin is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape, using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching her. What follows is a harrowing story of bravery and redemption. With Turtle’s escalating acts of physical and emotional courage, the reader watches, heart in throat, as this teenage girl struggles to become her own hero—and in the process, becomes ours as well.
Shot through with striking language in a fierce natural setting, My Absolute Darling is an urgently told, profoundly moving read that marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer.
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There are books we like well enough to recommend, but there are a very few… that we remember forever. To my own shortlist I can now add My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent…This book is ugly, beautiful, horrifying, and uplifting.
So very conflicted about rating this book. Terrifying and tremendous at the same time. This book is not for the faint of heart; one human’s abuse of another is monstrous. Turtle Alveston is a fourteen year old girl suffering from the death of her mother and being raised by her brute, abusive, deeply disturbed survivalist “father.” I case the last word in quotes because Martin is a despicable piece of humanity whose treatment of his daughter only increases his levels of depravity. Be aware that the scenes of his abuse are not for the squeamish. Turtle finally begins to meet people outside of her home and Martin cannot abide with this.
This is a debut novel that has received, deservedly, high praise from some of the finest writers writing books today. The depth of description, the pace and direction of this story, place it in the cabal with other great coming of age novels, “Catcher in the Rye,” “A Separate Peace,” and “Lord of the Flies,” to name a few. Descriptive passages of the Washington wilderness and the minutiae of its wildlife read like poetry. Existential inquiries into the life of the abused girl and her still powerful “love/hate” for her “father,” are heart rending and thought provoking.
If you are willing to go here, you will be trapped by the story, the writing, the psyches of all the characters involved. You will come to know and believe that true monsters do walk amongst us, we just often do not see them until it is too late.
I look forward to the next work by this talented young author!
“You look like a girl raised by wolves. You know that?”
Turtle Alveston is a complex protagonist dealing with issues ranging from self-identity and growing up to abuse, both physical and mental. She’s 14 years old and already decades more mature than her peers, a tragic side effect of which is she doesn’t understand how to communicate with them. She’s bitter, angry, friendless, and confused, and her father and grandfather (the only people she talks to for much of the book) have their own problems.
Turtle’s father, Martin, is the center of Turtle’s world and is easy to hate, but Tallent draws a compelling picture of her struggle to break away from him. He’s the rock in her life, and though he treats her awfully, she can’t picture her life without him and is terrified of the possibility.
Tallent uses the most artistic language to describe the Alveston home and land in remote Northern California, but also to depict things like injured animals and amputation. The result is an unforgettable narrative in a similar vein to Educated and The Glass Castle.
Every scene in this astonishing novel packs so much tension, so much insight, such beautiful prose and such masterful handling of detail, I simply could not stop reading.
I couldn’t put it down. The countryside itself was a major character- the author’s attention to detail was phenomenal. I really got a feel for Mendocino and its denizens. While some of the reviews considered the book’s descriptions of incest and Turtle’s responses to it to be overly lurid and unnecessary, I believe they were highly realistic and achingly descriptive of what a young girl like Turtle might really feel and think about herself under the circumstances. It’s a tough book but a very good one. Pounce!
It’s hard to say you enjoyed this book, because most of it is hard to take. That said, it was very well written. Also I read this book very quickly because I needed to know how things worked out. The book explored a subject that is all to often swept under the rug. People don’t want to acknowledge what is happening, and don’t know how to deal with it if they do. To those of you who are lucky enough not to believe that people like the father really exist , I am here to tell you that they do.
A wonderful book with a tragic story. Characters are real and haunting. Highly recommend this book
Dark, complex, dysfunctionally protective, isolating, painful… I was not prepared for the content in this book. The descriptive writing style and dialogue transported me to the culture and setting of a disturbed man preparing his daughter for any and every bad thing while living off the grid. Multiple degrees of varying [unromanticized] abuses are featured while we learn how these characters function, and how victimization can alter one’s thought process. Please seek out spoilers if you are a reader who may benefit from trigger warnings. Surprisingly, there is some integrated hope to show all is not lost, and that healing is a process with an obtainable beginning. This book won’t be for everyone but I liked it overall.
Couldn’t get past the first chapter. Two things I hate guns and abusive men. Nuff said.
I’m not sure why I finished this book. When I did, I went back and re-read the cover to see if I had somehow read the wrong book. Obviously the person who wrote the blurb had not read the same book as me.
This was not a story about a girl who reaches puberty, meets a guy, and starts to rebel against her father. This is an ugly story full of incest and torture and sadism. It was sick. Lots of nice descriptive language in between, but that couldn’t make the story less “in your face”, and I don’t want to read stories where a father is committing incest and torture and sadistic acts against his daughter. I’m not a goody-two-shoes or a rom-com reader, but this book was over the top even for me.
It was a good read. Very well written. Excellent imagery. It is a tragic story with violence and sexual abuse. A tale of ultimate survival.
Only read a couple chapters. Sorry, this book is not to my liking.
The topics covered are sensitive.
While this book was very hard for me to read, in fact I can’t remember a book EVER making me this uncomfortable, I believe it is quite an accomplishment. Young Turtle is an incredible protagonist and the world in which she is trapped, both willingly and against her will is very believable (and upsetting.) Besides scenes of violent incest, there are scenes of brutal violence including the amputation of a finger that just made me shiver and groan. But My Absolute Darling is a story of how the human spirit perseveres despite the most awful experiences. It is redeeming in the fact that not only does Turtle’s spirit survive, she maintains a capacity to love throughout.
It was very strange, and violent, but it becomes very inspiring and very healing! She was a fabulous character!
way too violent
This is one of the most disturbing and. sorrowful book I have read. It is a topic that few people will “enjoy”. We live in a wold of evil and ghastly events…why choose to read a book about it?? If it had offered some meaningful take away, the book might be redeemed.
I read for pleasure and information as well as beautiful descriptions. I deal with the issues in this book professionally and not for leisure reading.
I listened to the audiobooks that was brilliantly read. Engaging from the beginning. Always something keeping you engaged.
This is another book that at times you just want to put down and quit reading but …
you just can’t.
I must have missed something in the reviews I only glanced at…I did not realize that this novel details a father’s ongoing rapes of his young daughter…well written but not the story I was looking for.