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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It was actually hard to read. It was so brutal and real, but I couldn’t put it down. Loved her support and survival.
Tragic, often hard to read sad tale of a strong young woman living in a very unfortunate situation.
In the darkness of this coming-of-age story is extraordinary beauty. This is an edge of your seat, page-turning thriller written in exquisite, and thoughtful lush prose. Stunningly painful but worth our suffering, we are inside Turtle’s head, feeling her ambivalence toward her narcissistic abusive father, experiencing her slow but steady understanding that she is not what happens to her, she can choose what she wishes to become.
Even her Grandfather’s name for her is revelatory in this lovely metaphorical passage, “When a sweetpea knows something’s name, she thinks she knows everything about it, and she stops looking at it. But there is nothing in a name, and to say you know a thing’s name is to say that you know nothing, less than nothing. Don’t ever think the name is the thing, because there is only the thing itself, and the names are just tricks, to help you remember them.” This is brilliant. She loves him, and she hates him. He is damaged. To name something, labeling it, does not adequately define it. To understand something fully and accept it for what it is, love it, and still reject it.
This inexorable bond is what exists between all abusive relationships, and especially between a father and daughter. “He has a way of watching her that makes her feel as if she is the most important thing in the world.” This is a textbook statement you will hear from all victims of domestic violence, so common it is almost a cliché if it weren’t so accurate.
There is a breathtaking passage on her sorrow
She waits, and her waiting and her silence is discipline in the stead of real sorrow, and still she goes down into it, her cheek to the floor, breathing slowly, hours passing and each hour like the first, each breath like the last… some sensitivity that she has long kept in abeyance awakening within her, and she can feel it, that gathering of pain, but it plays with her a game of red light/green light, and when she looks at it, it is far away and unmoving, but when she suspends her mind, lying there on the floor and gazing across the boards but not thinking, then she can feel it grow closer until it is all through her, the sorrow replete in the unattended emptiness of her mid like wild radishes blooming in an empty lot. It has found whole parts of her that she did not know she had.
She is frozen, resigned to her fate. There are poignant events with her Grandfather’s dog, Cayenne, and the fawn that illustrate the transformation in her awareness. Gabriel Tallent’s writing is brilliant in its subtlety. I love the personalization within this passage:
“Her moments of happiness occur right at the margin of the unbearable. She knows it will not last and she thinks, you can never forget what it was like, here, without him. You have to hold tight on to it, how good it is. Remember the way everything felt clean, and good. There was no rottenness in any of it. But also, she thinks, how hard. Nothing is as difficult as a sustained and unremitting contact with your own mind. She thinks, does it matter if it is difficult? It doesn’t matter. It is still better. Turtle Alveston, do you take this nothingness and this emptiness and this solitude? She thinks, do you take all these nights alone and will you have this and only this for the rest of your life?”
At the end of the story, my first reaction was a disappointment with its inconclusiveness. But that was the trick! He reminds us, we can choose what we wish to become.
Disturbing, shocking and deeply affecting
Extremely intense
Child abuse is not in my expertise, but I could not put this book down because I wanted the main character to find a way out.
Sad and scary story of abused and molested daughter by her psychotic father. Violent ending
The author takes the type of abusive upbringing that is the subject of many stories and movies, but avoids a simplistic treatment of the characters and their choices. A victim can simultaneously be a hero, an abuser, or both. There are gripping scenes of life and death struggle, common adolescent coming of age feelings that become dangerous if known, daily tensions of secret keeping and eggshell walking right alongside comfortable daily patterns and rhythms you’d find in any household. The reader experiences it all through the inner world of a very unique young girl that you can’t help but root for with all your heart. I will be reading this novel a second time.
I couldn’t read much of this book. The violence and perversion were too disturbing.
Powerful but deeply disturbing
This is a book I have, with trepidation, recommended to my girlfriend and my best friend. I think I would put Turtle alongside Scout (To Kill a Mockingbird) as one of my all time most memorable female characters. Difficult situations to read in this book, but magnificently told. Really unforgettable.
The book is well crafted, but the content is not for the faint of heart. Some brutal scenes made me ashamed of human capabilities.
My Absolutely Darling was one the best thrillers that I have read in a long time.
The writing was good, very descriptive, and you just want to read every word because it is so suspensful.
Powerful. Very dark. But riveting. I will be looking for other books by this author.
In the first chapter the main character is called a bitch and a slut, as well as raped by her father. I couldn’t go any further. Horrible.
This was a disturbing read told from a female perspective but written by a male. The author is very knowledgeable about guns and ammunition so it was a little unbelievable that a teenage female would know that much about ammo and guns. The incest was disturbing but I was expecting that having read the summary and reviews.
This novel was amazing. Some parts were difficult to think about, but the characters were unique and complex. I loved it and hated it at the same time.
Beautiful writing, compelling characters.
it was just a little twisted but just enough to hold the readers attention I thought it was a well written book with lots of factual events that happen in some peoples lives was very tragic but showed the survival instinct of the main character well.
Didn’t think I was going to like this, but I did, and am hoping for another in this series. Had some unusual twists and turns.