Gabriel Tallent

This book has been termed a masterpiece and it certainly is. The book, its language, its story are as lush, beautiful, and menacing as the world Turtle inhabits in Northern California. My Absolute Darling is at times so beautiful you reread paragraphs to savor the beauty of the language and the pictures it evokes in your mind. And then the horror presents itself and you cringe, want to put it down, but like Turtle you continue on, you need to continue on.

Yes it is a very difficult book to show more read, but 14 year old Turtle has so much to show us, to teach us, to make us feel, question and understand. show less

My Absolute Darling is Gabriel Tallent’s first book. I hope it is the first of many because he is a fierce new talent. Turtle is a singular protagonist, an independent and insular fourteen-year-old whose paranoiac father has trained to survive the coming environmental and social apocalypse. She knows how to defend herself, to forage, and is most comfortable in the woods. She is less comfortable in school where she struggles with vocabulary quizzes and the insistent questioning of a teacher show more who suspects all is not right for her at home.

She has many names. At school, they call her by her birth name, Julia. Turtle is the one she prefers. Martin, her father, calls her Kibble and her grandpa calls her SweetPea. “My absolute darling” is what Martin calls her when he is raping her. By the end of the first chapter, the outlines of Turtle’s life are stark, vivid, and painful.

Part of coming of age, of growing up, is individuation. Martin cannot tolerate that. He insists that she belongs to him and is enraged by her withdrawal and silence, by her “inwardness.” But she knows she is herself, not him, not just part of him, but she is trapped by isolation and love for her father. After a crisis, though, he takes off, abandoning her. It’s like a summer sabbatical, in a way. She develops friendships, glimpses a different world that is more ordinary and connected, and even falls in love. She imagines a different self, a different Turtle, and wonders if she can free herself or will love and pity trap her with her father.

My Absolute Darling is sometimes very difficult to read. By the end of the first chapter, I was horrified and almost put the book down. I had already recognized the author’s beautiful prose, but I did not know if I could stomach the subject matter. It is horrific, in part because there is this conflict within Turtle between her love for her father and social taboos. When he molests her, she feels loved, at least in part. It’s gross, repellent, and ugly, but it is how incest continues, how molesters hold power over their victims. If ever a book needed trigger warnings, though, this one does.

The language is sometimes raw and ugly. Other times it is just so beautiful. A spider has a speculative creep. When Turtle is walking in the woods and tide pools of Northern California, there is such beauty, though it is balanced by the rough violence of nature. There is never a moment without that edge of violence, whether it’s a tarantula killing a mouse or scavengers ravaging an animal corpse. Even gardening is a struggle against nature red in tooth and claw.

There is something claustrophobic about the book, with how Martin has isolated Turtle and how the woods close in at times. There is no ease. It is fast-paced, no rest for Turtle or for the reader. It is violent, raw, painful, and ultimately rewarding. It is a rough book to read, but richly rewarding if you can stick it out. After I returned to the book after that first chapter, I read straight through to the end.

My Absolute Darling was released this week. I received an e-galley from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, through Edelweiss.

My Absolute Darling at Penguin Random House
Article by Gabriel Tallent on writing My Absolute Darling
New York Times review/author bio

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/09/01/9780735211179/ show less

This is a painfully difficult book to review, much less rate, because I can justify anything from a qualified pan (qualified because the writing is just too good to dismiss the book altogether) to an unqualified rave.

The good parts: The writing is just exquisite. And the story is gripping. When I read the last hundred pages last night I found myself simultaneously reading faster to find out what would happen and forcing myself to slow down so I could appreciate the prose. I also thought show more that Turtle, in particular, was a memorable and believable character who really sprang from the page.

The bad parts: The book is compelling, but it is also just too much. If your book can reasonably be described as "darker than A Little Life" you have gone too dark. In addition, some of the teenage boys have utterly terrible dialogue, which surprised me since the author was a teenage boy not so very long before he wrote this book. Which brings me to my main issue with the book: it is difficult to forget that it is written by a man, and knowing that it is makes its blunt brutality and unsparing descriptions of Turtle's relationship with her father even more unsettling than they would be otherwise.

The upshot here is that I think this book is brilliantly written and makes Gabriel Tallent a writer to watch in the future (it's hard to believe that a novel this polished is a debut). Also, I've been up since 4 a.m. because I had a nightmare about it, and I can't sincerely recommend it to anyone because I wish I hadn't read it. So how many stars does that translate to? show less

I couldn't think of a shelf to put this under: incest, abuse, adolescence, horror. Utterly readable yet wrenching as hell, painful, beautiful nature descriptions, evocative scenes and incite into the pain of sexual abuse. Authentic dialogue among youth. Zoomed through it as though it were a thriller, sometimes exhilarated and sometimes sickened. A stunning accomplishment for its young author.