I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review

I looked for ways to be her dog.

Told all from Nora's point-of-view, your enjoyment of The Absolutes is going to depend on how long you can swim around in lit fic with an “artist temperament” vibe for a little over three hundred pages. Nora has been sent to Turin, Italy by her parents to spend time with some cousins because at fifteen years old, she's been self-harming (cutting on her thigh) and seems to be in a general malaise. There, she grows an attachment to her cousin Federica and her emotions swirl around wanting to control, be controlled, and sexual attraction. There's some felt tension there between the girls and as we don't have Federica's pov, we never really know how much Nora is creating in her own mind or interpreting correctly. When Nora starts to have a panic attack on the slopes, a man comforts her out of it. Federica says the man's name is Nicola and he comes from one of the most dangerous families in Italy.

Maybe he was creating the truth and then I had to live in it; we were opposites.

This was broken into three parts, the first with Nora in Italy and giving readers a look at how her submissive tendencies were taking form and how she imprinted on Nicola. There's some time jump with Nicola in college and then seeing Nicola again at a party, only strengthening her obsession with him as he seems like such an unknown quantity. The second half has Nora aged up to twenty-eight and now working for a friend named Patrick, who also happens to know Nicola, and living with a man named Leif. The second half delivers on the predictable dancing around if Nora and Nicola are going to have an affair but tries to make it interesting by cloaking it in Nora's artist temperament and dangerous undertones of Nicola's relationship with his father and the unsaid fact that they are mafia.

I wondered as I did so often whether he was finding me or inventing me.

I felt this was too long, I drowned in the lit fic-ness of it all and the “Nora is so Different than all other plebs”. It really is a story of a young girl that book clubs could argue about if she has mental health issues that need to be helped with or if she is someone who has a very submissive personality and needs and craves that kind of handling. Even though we never get Nicola's thoughts, I could see book clubs discussing if he was manipulating Nora, by acting out what he thinks she wanted or if he really was the personality that meshed with Nora. If some of the long winding self-indulgent passages had been edited, this could have come across sharper. The third part shed some light on the truth of the manipulation for me and an ending with the road Nora seems to be firmly on. Nora was an interesting character but adding in some of the mafia plot with Nicola and wallowing in how everyone else as too blah made the story drag. ( )