My Absolute Darling: A Novel

A well written first person narrative of childhood abuse told through beautiful language and, at times, over the top storylines; but the author takes care in bringing the psychological manipulation of the abuser and the internal struggle, the confusion and convictions, of the abused to light.

It's a grotesque but captivating story.
Well worth the read, but it will not be received the same across the board... Hence the mixed reviews.

This is my first book review. I felt compelled to review this book because I was so angered by it.

I purchased the book because of the overwhelming good reviews and especially after hearing the interview with the author on "The Newshour". I know it is often difficult for a book to live up to such high expectations...and for most of the book I felt it was ok but not terrible. Martin was developed only marginally as a survivalist and father who "loved" his daughter while sexually and physically abusing her. I felt great empathy for Turtle and admired her resilience. When Turtle met Jacob I thought the relationship was important in building her sense of self and competency. But the language Jacob used seemed not very realistic for a teenager.

So I had doubts while reading the book, but Chapter 20 was too much. (Somewhat of a spoiler alert)....the narrative in that chapter as it pertained to Martin, Turtle and Cayenne and the "coin" was just too grotesque. I have worked with abused and neglected children and while I am sickened by descriptions of incest and abuse, I realize it is a very unpleasant experience that too many children experience. BUT this chapter was way over the top. I found the situation very hard to believe and, even after the recent events in Las Vegas, I found Martin too much the embodiment of evil and at this point I couldn't finish the book.

Based upon early reviews rating this book as a National Book Award contender and other rave reviews, I bought and read this. How this piece of misogynistic garbage has been lauded by so many as an outstanding book is beyond my comprehension. I am no prude and certainly curse myself. In fact, one of my favorite (audible) books over the past few years was Dan Marshall's Home is Burning, where the f word is in every sentence. However, I cannot abide the c word. It is prevalent in this book and is used by Turtle, the main character constantly. Turtle, by the way, is a 14 hour girl living in Northern California with her brilliant, psychopathic father in a very unconventional atmosphere. It is allegedly a story of her triumph. Spoiler: in the end, she does prevail. The brutality and cruelty wrapped in a facade of love by Turtle's dad is hard to read, but other writers have done type of story. Turtle refers to herself and most females in the books as the c word, among other things. No, just no. Gabriel Tallent, this is not what you should put out there from a female protagonist. What a horrible degradation of women by this author. The author does well in his descriptions of the landscape - which is the only reason I gave this two stars. I am sorry I spent money on this trash.

You WILL NOT PUT THIS BOOK DOWN!
Mesmerizing, elegant, fast paced( though the subject is frightening) and powerful.
This author is amazing and he should quickly write another!!
I can also see this as a movie.
Most importantly, the central story is a warning to our society and therefore A Must Read!

I heard this book hyped on NPR a few days before it's release, and the premise seemed absolutely enthralling. Just finished it and while the story was absolutely gripping and I was not able to put it down, I found myself significantly underwhelmed at many aspects of this work.

The omniscient narration lets you in on the thoughts of only the main character, and the writer is not able to fill in the gaps of the other important characters effectively through their dialogue. Because of this I felt that all of the characters other than the lead, were highly underdeveloped, and I was not able to connect with any of them.

With that said, the main character "turtle" was written in with great finesse and attention to detail. You were living inside of her head and emotions, and she was a riveting lead, but without other simpathetic, well built characters to play off of, I didn't feel that her character was able to be as compelling as she could have been.

Lastly, and this is really the kicker, the ending I fear might be stolen for the next Marvel comics movie. It was so cheesy, one sided, and super-heroesque, that it was utterly irredeemable. It truly put a sour taste in my mouth. I had been completely glued to the book and locked into the characters (regardless of the flaws I described earlier) and then the climax comes with no finesse, no subtlety and no message to get across, and then the chapters after the climax just rubbed salt in the wound, reminding me of something I might find in the "teen fiction" section of the library.

Overall, I'm glad I read it, it was very captivating and watching this gripping lead character, so realistically stumble and fall through the situations she is put through was extremely gripping. I just can not get over how tradgically pathetic the ending was, it just ruins it.

My advice, buy it, read it, and stop when things start to get really exciting and just use your imagination to finish it.

Beautifully written tragic story of a strong child dealing with the sickening and heartbreaking duality of incest. Turtle's struggles between the love and hate she feels for her father give a glimpse into a reality that sadly many in our country are living every day. The characters' weapon obsessions felt chillingly timely after recent events in Vegas.

Could not get into the story because of the profanity and because of the horror of Kibble's abusive treatment by her father. It seems as if the daily news in our country is now is finding a voice into the novels of the 21st century--it all seems so painfully redundant. Where is the lasting and immediately profound messages many of us look for when we search for a truly great and insightful novel that serves to help us on our journey as we continue our search for the basic goodness and kindness in Humanity?

Disturbing novel. It was recommended to me by a friend and I read it unknowingly of the content. I will remember this book for a long time. I love stories about tough women overcoming some of life's challenges. Sadly this is not an uncommon experience for women, the more it is discussed and written about, hopefully the less child abuse of this kind will be tolerated.

If you can tolerate the sensitive subject matter, this read will draw you in and keep you there like no other book in a very long time. It is phenomenal while being disturbing, but it's worth the emotional stir!

I heard this book hyped on NPR a few days before it's release, and the premise seemed absolutely enthralling. Just finished it and while the story was absolutely gripping and I was not able to put it down, I found myself significantly underwhelmed at many aspects of this work.

The omniscient narration lets you in on the thoughts of only the main character, and the writer is not able to fill in the gaps of the other important characters effectively through their dialogue. Because of this I felt that all of the characters other than the lead, were highly underdeveloped, and I was not able to connect with any of them.

With that said, the main character "turtle" was written in with great finesse and attention to detail. You were living inside of her head and emotions, and she was a riveting lead, but without other simpathetic, well built characters to play off of, I didn't feel that her character was able to be as compelling as she could have been.

Lastly, and this is really the kicker, the ending I fear might be stolen for the next Marvel comics movie. It was so cheesy, one sided, and super-heroesque, that it was utterly irredeemable. It truly put a sour taste in my mouth. I had been completely glued to the book and locked into the characters (regardless of the flaws I described earlier) and then the climax comes with no finesse, no subtlety and no message to get across, and then the chapters after the climax just rubbed salt in the wound, reminding me of something I might find in the "teen fiction" section of the library.

Overall, I'm glad I read it, it was very captivating and watching this gripping lead character, so realistically stumble and fall through the situations she is put through was extremely gripping. I just can not get over how tradgically pathetic the ending was, it just ruins it.

My advice, buy it, read it, and stop when things start to get really exciting and just use your imagination to finish it.

Beautifully written tragic story of a strong child dealing with the sickening and heartbreaking duality of incest. Turtle's struggles between the love and hate she feels for her father give a glimpse into a reality that sadly many in our country are living every day. The characters' weapon obsessions felt chillingly timely after recent events in Vegas.

Could not get into the story because of the profanity and because of the horror of Kibble's abusive treatment by her father. It seems as if the daily news in our country is now is finding a voice into the novels of the 21st century--it all seems so painfully redundant. Where is the lasting and immediately profound messages many of us look for when we search for a truly great and insightful novel that serves to help us on our journey as we continue our search for the basic goodness and kindness in Humanity?

Disturbing novel. It was recommended to me by a friend and I read it unknowingly of the content. I will remember this book for a long time. I love stories about tough women overcoming some of life's challenges. Sadly this is not an uncommon experience for women, the more it is discussed and written about, hopefully the less child abuse of this kind will be tolerated.

If you can tolerate the sensitive subject matter, this read will draw you in and keep you there like no other book in a very long time. It is phenomenal while being disturbing, but it's worth the emotional stir!

Where is Jack Reacher when you need him? This is just a pathetic attempt to write porn disguised as understanding the victim...I'm sorry I read it and I can't think of a single person I'd pass it on to.

Julia aka turtle to the reader and kibble by Martin her father is raised in a reclusive marksman survivalist.The family are deep and convoluted When Martin repeatedly rapes and batters Turtle and then sets after an 11 girl Martin raped .Turtle becomes a deadly hunter who can not let go of the love of her father

A friend raved, so I borrowed a copy and somehow made my way through this dank, dull,overwritten novel about a feral, learning-disabled girl who is repeatedly beaten, tortured, raped and seduced by her father. I can't decide what bothered me most; the endless gun worship, the grueling descriptions of injury and ditch medicine (home amputation!), the improbable flights of intellectualism and insight in the feral deaf girl who loves to clean her guns, the animal deaths, the internalized misogyny, the eroticized incest and rape...take your pick. Aside from Turtle, the characters in this book are fantastic. They really are. But Turtle is a masculinized cypher, a teenaged sexually abused Rambo, impossibly vacant and strong, who somehow morphs into a blubbering girl who just wants a boy to like her at the end. And this is her redemption. With all this, the book manages to be boring as heck for about 2/3 of the pages, and when something "happens," it's drawn out to such an attenuated degree that even the big events become boring. I do not recommend it, but two stars for all the other characters aside from Turtle.

When I started reading it I liked it, but then skimmed over parts which I rarely do and ultimately was disappointed and so hurried through the last two chapters. The characters were not fully realized. I knew after the first chapter what would happen (abused girl gets her revenge), and, when it did happen, it was drawn out and unbelievable. I thought the violent confrontations were too prolonged. Stephen King called this a masterpiece, but, then again, this is right his kind of writing.

Spoiler alert! If you like to read about a demented father who rapes his daughter on a regular basis then this is the book for you. This author is twisted and must have been sexually abused as a child ! Very disturbing. How could it have gotten such rave reviews???

The grittiest, most difficult book I have read since Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD. But, if anyone thinks this was based on some sort of survivalist fairy tale, or incorrect or insubstantial thinking, they live in a world I have never been to.

The prose spans a range of deftly poetic to over the top. The author's portrait of abusive behavior is similarly problematic, alternately trying to establish the father as a truly evil person then presenting him as bright and caring. I'm still sorting out my conflicted feelings about this novel.

WOW!

INTRO: My Absolute Darlings is a coming-of-age Action-Adventure that may forever change how you understand life to be. In one sentence, I find it incredulous that a newbie writer penned such a graphic, gritty novel as his debut. Read on to learn more...

*** ARE THERE PROFANITIES USED? ***

I guess I should have read between the lines in the book’s description. The phrase striking language actually means the book contains a great number of profanities. Further, the graphic sex scenes will enrage some, and enthrall others. Were it not for otherwise stellar writing, I might have given up halfway through. Yet, as the excerpt from Chapter 2 (below) shows, there is a great deal more to this novel than the sum total of vulgarities.

Put another way, My Absolute Darlings reflects the characters it portrays in an honest, if obscene, manner that, if I were the editor I would probably have chosen to let the writer tell this tale as the author saw fit. It is THAT good.

BLUSH FACTOR Before you choose to read this to your 80-year-old grandmother, know that you will likely turn 80 shades of red. If this were a film it would be rated PG 17 or R for language and mature content. This is a novel to first read in private, then absorb it, savor in it, even marinate yourself in its saucy, sweet-and-sour flavor. Then, if you dare, share it with Grandma….but keep the AED handy…

POV Third person.

DOES THIS WRITER SHOW OR TELL WHAT WE SEE/FEEL/HEAR? The author paints a picture at every turn that is exquisite and incredible.

DOES THE WRITER EVOKE THE FIVE SENSES? Absolutely, with uncanny skill for a debut novel.

IS THIS THE FIRST IN A SERIES OR SHOULD I READ AN EARLIER BOOK FIRST?

CLIFFHANGER? No cliffhanger, but a big part of me wishes there was, because that would mean there is another story coming.

Q - How was this book obtained?
A – Bought on the store.

Q - Are there a lot of typos/misspellings, grammatical errors or other editing failures?
A – No, but I recollect at least one double contraction, such as I’ve never noticed before. The word chosen was, “couldn’t’ve.” I’ll leave it to others to decide if this is an error. For me, though, it feels natural, so I’ll say no more.

Q - Is this a fast, easy read or is it more of a leisure read?
A – This is a page-turner.

Q - My biggest pleasure or disappointment?
A – Ordinarily, I would complain about the excessive profanities that include graphic sexual content, but, this writing is too good to quibble.

To give a feel for the editing, and the style and flow of this work, I am posting a brief excerpt below.

Excerpt

‘…When the fog lifts from grass still smoking with dew, Turtle takes the Remington 870 down from its wall pegs, trips the release, and slivers back the slide to show the green buckshot hull. She jacks the shotgun closed and tilts it over her shoulder and goes down the stairs and out the back door. It is beginning to rain. The drops patter down from the pines and stand trembling on the nettle leaves and sword fronds. She scrambles along the joists of the back deck and clambers down the hillside alive with rotting logs and rough-skinned newts and California slender salamanders, her heels breaking through the gooey crust of myrtle leaves and churning up the black earth. She comes cautious and switchbacking down to the wellspring of Slaughterhouse Creek, where the maidenhair ferns are black-stemmed with leaves like green teardrops, the nasturtiums hanging in tangles with their crisp, wet, nasturtium scent, the rocks scrolled with liverwort.

The spring here pours from a mossy nook in the hillside, and where it falls, it has carved a basin out of the living stone, a well of cold, clear, iron-tasting water, big as a room, thatched with logs worn feathery by age. Turtle sits on the logs, taking off all of her clothes and laying the shotgun among them and slipping feetfirst into the stone pool—because here she seeks her own peculiar solace, and here she feels it to be the solace of cold places, of a thing that is clear and cold and alive. She holds her breath and sinks to the bottom and, drawing her knees to her shoulders with her hair rising around her like weeds, she opens her eyes to the water and looks up and sees writ huge across the rain-dappled surface the basking shapes of newts with their fingers splayed and their golden-red bellies exposed to her, their tails churning lazily. They are bent and distorted, hazed the way things are under water, and the cold is good for her, it brings her back to herself. She breaks the surface and heaves out onto the logs and feels the warmth return and watches the forest around her.

She rises and climbs carefully back up the hillside and walks heel to toe across the joists of the back deck in the gathering rain and then into the kitchen, where the black-tailed weasel startles and looks up, one paw raised above a plate covered in old steak bones.

She sets the shotgun on the counter and goes to the fridge and opens it and stands wet, her hair slicked to her back and straggled around her face, racking the eggs on the counter’s edge and breaking them into her mouth and…

Tallent, Gabriel. My Absolute Darling: A Novel (p. 24). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Tallent, Gabriel. My Absolute Darling: A Novel (pp. 23-24). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Bottom Line:

I rose to the challenge to see the world from a gritty, raw, viewpoint with this Action-Adventure and am grateful for the author’s skill and the editor’s decision to let the writer’s voice come through.

Five stars out of five.

Comments regarding your opinion of this book or of my review, whether favorable or unfavorable, are always welcome. If you buy the book based on my review and become disappointed, especially, I do want to know that and I want to understand how I can improve as a book reviewer. Just please be polite.

Thank you.

The tone of the book, specifically the graphically detailed descriptions (most of which seemed completely unnecessary in furthering the story) of horrific abuse and incest of a young teenage girl, seemed bizarrely sadistic to me. And, teenage boys just do not speak like that...PhD Philosophy professors at Harvard are not as esoteric as the boys in this book. Lastly, the OVERLY descriptive passages about the Mendocino coast were hard for me to understand. I grew up going to the beach and exploring tidal pools, and I've been to the California coast multiple times, but I just could not picture what the author was describing most of the time.
This book is depressing and creepy (especially coming from a male author) but I did finish it, so yeah.

While I couldn't put the book down, I can't say I actually enjoyed reading it. If you're reading the reviews you already know the young girl in the story consistently gets sexually abused by her father. What bothered me to no end is that this was repeatedly made to seem somewhat consensual by the author, like a young girl may actually long for that. In my opinion he did not do enough to establish the terror that would actually bring to the victim in real life. The prose is beautiful, the end is absurd and unbelievable. It got 3 stars because I think there's something there worth reading, but not the masterpiece many keep claiming.

Of course this novel took 8 years to write. It is tight, frightening, educated and even lyrical. Gabriel Tallent comes by his ability honestly through his mother , Elizabeth Tallent, a writer I have always admired

Descriptive writing is fine, but I didn't need to know what every rock looked like every time a character passed one . I gave up when some of the characters somehow became island castaways. The teenage boy dialogue so grated on my titties. 420 pages that should have been 300. Editor - please. It became too irritating to finish.

Descriptive writing is fine, but I didn't need to know what every rock looked like every time a character passed one . I gave up when some of the characters somehow became island castaways. The teenage boy dialogue so grated on my titties. 420 pages that should have been 300. Editor - please. It became too irritating to finish.

I don't know whether to give this 4 or 5 stars. I do know that it's been days since I finished the book and can't stop thinking about it, the emotion it stirred within me shocked my senses. It's amazing how adults take the pure unadulterated love given them by children and turn it into something so insidious it's hard to comprehend. If this publication brings just 1 sexually abused child into the light then Mr. Tallent will have done his job.

Beautifully written. Always interesting to me when a man writes well from the female perspective...and he really does. It's extremely difficult to know what Turtle is going through. I wanted to step into the book and help her. Gabriel Tallent , amazingly, doesn't fix her. Powerful book.

What a novel! The author's descriptions of actions, people and landscapes are actually poetic in this relentlessly absorbing and yet terrifying story of the evil that follows the physical and emotional abuse generations of neglect creates. The heroine both loves and hates her father who has taught her to defend herself against outsiders and to overcome adversity by being self-sufficient. As she endures the abuse she discovers empathy for a young girl and uses that new found strength of character to finally free herself in an absolutely riveting struggle with her father. This book will stay with you for a long time. Terrific read.

My wife is a voracious reader. I bought it for her to read based on the the store editor's recommendation. She started reading and found the storyline difficult to follow inasmuch as the narrative jumped around. I was surprised that she decided to stick with it and finish. At the end she said that the gratuitous use of profanity was distracting and failed to add to the understanding of the characters. So I have selected the "I don't like it" two star rating on her behalf.
I won't be trusting the judgment of the the store editors again.

I rarely write reviews, but this book blew me away. Dark subject matter with plenty of triggers, so read a synopsis before buying, but the writing is lyrical and amazing, the level of talent here undeniable. Highly recommended.

The reviews are justified.

Like many people, I bought this based on the reviews and the New York Times article about it. I went into it nervous—my expectations were high. It wasn't likely they'd be met.

Tallent had me in by the first chapter. Buyer beware: *THIS BOOK IS DISTURBING*. But if you can get past that, it'll get into your head. You'll find yourself thinking about Turtle and Martin and the grandfather, drawn to their story while simultaneously repulsed. I haven't had a book get into my head like this in ages.

I don't write a lot of reviews here on the store. This one, though. I wish I could give it more than five stars.

I'm an avid, if not the most learned, reader. This book was brutal in many ways. I found descriptions of surroundings much more compelling than the story itself. I caught myself skimming over parts because I couldn't connect.

It had too much profanity that didn't really add to the story. It was quite depressing, although probably realistic in that this happens in some families. I would not recommend it to any of my friends.

This book was recommended to me by a bookseller as “amazing”. While it is beautifully written, the story is awful. Having lived in Northern California I appreciated the exquisite descriptions of the beauty of the coast. However, this book is graphic and extremely violent. If anyone struggles with reading about child abuse and child sexual abuse, do not read this book. As a survivor of family violence, it was very difficult to read. I finished it with the hopes of redemption and for the protagonist to find herself and become the heroine the jacket declared. There is nothing uplifting or empowering at the end of this tragic story. The characters are difficult to like and I found myself feeling only anger and sadness for the abused protagonist. I cannot recommend this book.

Hold your breath for this deep dive into the warped world of a girl who has to claw her way out of horrendous circumstances. The writing is quite stylized and can be exhausting to read..the plot sometimes is lost in the overgrowth. But’s worth the hacking.

A truly awful read -- despite the reviews -- I could handle the subject matter of incest and violence, but the development of the story just got worse and worse and I couldn't wait for the book to be over.

Really a contemptably dark and bleak piece of gothic horror. It's somewhere between Gone Girl and a field guide to coastal habitats. The climax is utterly horrid and the ending.... Well I can't even. Turtle is located on a spectrum between Katniss Everdeen and Harry Potter, sort of their deranged daughter. And Pops is Valdemort and President Snow. It's that formulaic, which is startling for such a specific piece of work.

Nobody's perfect! But yes, actually you are a good parent. You could prove it to yourself by reading this technical survivalist thriller / extreme psychological study / sublime elegy to the natural features of Mendocino. ( ... / satire of Western philosophy, ... / ...)

'My Absolute Darling' is the intense and graphic story of an abused girl’s fight to save herself. Not for the faint hearted, Gabriel Tallent’s heart wrenching yet spirited novel is incredibly confronting. This is the story of a young girl named Turtle and her deranged father Martin.

This raw novel is about child abuse both sexual and physical and is hardcore and ugly at times. It had me stunned by its ugliness and depth, yet also riveted. Fourteen year-old Turtle lives with Martin, her father, in California, he is a survivalist and has raised her that way. She is adept at shooting targets and is prepared for any type of attack. Their home is almost bare and Turtle hears the rats chomp on their left-overs at night, at least on those nights when Martin doesn't carry her to his bed...

There is an enormous amount of profanity used in the book which could be a big turn off for the reader, that and the fact that the subject matter was disgusting. This novel is dark, very dark, and if you are offended or disturbed by the ugliest of human scenes, I don't recommend it. However, if you want to discover a great new writer and read a book that is raw and presents human character in its most disturbed form then read 'My Absolute Darling' by Gabriel Tallent.

I started reading this book, hadn't even read 5 pages, and started to wonder why I purchased this book. So I thought, give it a few more pages. Then I went back to the book page, to read the summary. It sounded like I needed to just read a bit more.That didn't help. Then I read some of the reviews here, on this page. When I saw the reviews, I decided I really didn't want to finish this book. Even if the main character did manage to overcome her circumstances, did I really want to spend several hours reading all the bad language? And meditate on the life she must be living? I decided, no. Maybe this author is very talented, but there are only so many hours in a day. I didn't want to spend them reading this book, and having those dark, negative images in my brain.

Repugnant and false from the first to the last. The description makes it sound like some kind of survivalist adventure. Instead, we get a grotesque drama that dwells rape and incest. And it's in "overcoming" those things that the main character finds her strength, which is a trope best left unwritten, certainly by male authors. Add in that it's wildly overwritten and that the dialogue is the most ludicrous I've come across in a novel in a long time, and you're left with this hideous male fantasy of a young girl being sexually abused until she turns into a badass and confronts her rapist. It's in terrible taste from beginning to end, and while I regret reading it, I can at least confirm that it moves quickly.

I was given this book by a friend because I have a house in Mendocino. I was looking forward to reading a book praised by authors I admire and filled with descriptions of places with which I am so familiar. The book started out well enough, but when the language became larded with descriptors referring to women's body parts, I started to disengage. The passages about the sexual and physical abuse of this young woman, and the impact on her worldview made me very uncomfortable. There is a brief interlude where I thought, okay, she has overcome, but wrong! There is more physical and sexual abuse, and now it includes a ten year old girl. The father is beyond a monster; he's a narcissistic, self-loathing, misogynistic horror. There wasn't a passage in which I could relate to him in any way at all or find any redeeming qualities. I forced myself to finish reading, I thought I must be missing something if all the reviews were so positive. What I miss is the time it took me to read it. I just felt sad when I was through. And as a parting note, I read and enjoyed the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books I am not squeamish or prudish about the use of graphic language, violence or sexual abuse in the service of a good story. This just wasn't a good story for me.

Sick and perverse. Why would anyone want to read about such horrible and unnecessarily graphic abuse? It really makes me wonder about the people who enjoy this book. Gratuitous perverse child molestation. I couldn't get past the first few pages and felt sick even touching this book.

This is one of the more disturbing books I have read. In all ways it's a horror story of physical , emotional and sexual abuse. The character of
"Turtle" is amazingly drawn and your sympathy is always with her even as you long for her to break free of both shackles, her own and those
imposed upon her. The ending of the book is terrifying and feels as though it was written for the screen.

On the down side, this book is so overly written, so unceasingly descriptive, that it often borders on pretentious even though some of
the images are stunning.

I will not soon forget the characters in this book. I wish I could

The horrible themes of violence and incest are almost unbearable, and I suspect, voyeuristic and a turn-on to some. I found much of the story utterly sensationalist, and cheap. In the beginning I had the impression Turtle and her father were almost hillbillies. Then he suddenly produces language of a different kind; erudite and littered with literary and philosophical references. This was unbelievable.
The author is obsessed the wilderness and outward-bound group survival (one only has to look at his website). The interactions of the teens is completely unbelievable, the dialogue, the continual references to literature — I can’t believe they would know these things. The story may be one of survival, but its style reads like a cross between horror, sensationalism and youth fiction. A scramble. The writing is heavy-handed, especially the dialogue of the teens, telling not showing. That particular part reads like a wilderness manual. Most of the story reads like a YA novel — but it is inappropriate. The violence and incest scenes are cheap and designed to titillate as well as to shock. To sensationalize the abuse of women to sell books is another cheap trick. And another trick I would guess is it’s to sell the movie rights.

Not a book I'd favorably compare with "To Kill a Mockingbird." I certainly wouldn't recommend it for a book club or any reading required through and including college.

There are a few lovely passages about the world of nature, but for the most part the book is unrelenting in its description of the abuse of a 14 year old girl.

I wonder if it would receive the accolades it has if it were a book about a young boy experiencing the same abuse.

"Page turner" definitely describes this book, which is the only reason I was able to finish it. I felt like I had to know what happened to Turtle, and I especially had to see her monstrous father die a horrible death. But I was incredibly disturbed by the content, especially the author's insistence upon writing rape scenes as though they are erotic fiction. Following a brutal scene in which 14-year-old Turtle is raped by her own father, Tallent takes the time to describe her cupping her "engorged pussy." EXCUSE ME?! Please don't ever use that term in reference to a child. I got the unsettling sense that this author not only gets off on writing these scenes, but has no qualms about profiting off these descriptions of suffering. This is basically very poetic child pornography.

While reading Gabriel Tallent’s debut novel titled, My Absolute Darling, I found myself patiently awaiting deeper character development or insight into human behavior. After four hundred pages, the characters remained poorly developed and I was no closer to understanding behavior than I was on page one. Protagonist Turtle lives almost off the grid with her father, Martin. Their relationship involves physical and psychological abuse and the title is how Martin refers to Turtle. The novel is packed with violence and trauma. While some readers will consider Turtle as a heroine, I considered her more as a survivor, and it’s easy to understand why she loves her father despite the abuse. The extended cast of characters are one-dimensional, and the community that ignores Turtle for most of the book seems keenly aware of her at the end. All those gaps and anomalies led me to close the book feeling as if I was part of the trauma, and I was glad to have it come to an end.

Rating: Two-star (I didn’t like it)

Turtle Alveston is fourteen and she could kill you as easily as look at you. Turtle lives in the Pacific Northwest far back in the woods with her survivalist father, Martin. He has trained her to shoot a gun with sharpshooter accuracy. She can use a knife, live for days in the wild and needs no one. Martin has taught her to distrust everyone, telling her that they only want to take her away from the only life she's known.

Martin has spent her life making her totally dependent on him. He has abused her physically, emotionally and sexually, telling her that only he loves her and that only he can protect her. Turtle has no self-esteem, growing up in a world where women and everything about them is belittled. She is isolated although she does go to school as Martin knows she could be taken away if he doesn't send her. But she has no friends there and barely tries. What is important is Martin and pleasing him for she is his darling, his absolute darling.

Then it happens. While out in the woods one day, she meets Jacob and his friend. They were going camping but are lost and have no skills to survive in the wild. For some reason, Turtle approaches them and helps them make a campsite and stays with them that night. It opens an entire new world to her, one that she realises Martin will never tolerate but one that she wants. She continues to see Jacob until Martin finds out and she has to give him up. Events mount up until she realises that she will have to choose between living her life as Martin's darling or joining the real world. Can she break away from everything she has been taught?

Turtle is a character like no other I've read about. She bursts onto the pages and into the reader's mind, never to depart. This book is getting enormous buzz and it should. It is easily the best book I've read this year. The back cover blurbs are from authors such as Celeste Ng, Stephen King and Phil Klay. This is a debut novel although that is hard to believe. Tallent mixes stark horror with such poetic language that the reader is transported into Turtle's world. This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.

The cover blurb sums it up:

"At fourteen, Turtle Alveston knows the use of every gun on her wall; that chaos is coming and only the strong will survive it; that her daddy loves her more than anything else in this world. And he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her with him. She doesn’t know why […] the line between love and pain can be so hard to see; why making a friend may be the bravest and most terrifying thing she has ever done; and what her daddy will do when he finds out…"

Turtle is aptly named: she is both a lizard-brained creature armored by her shell, and the mythical turtle who bears the world on its back. She is at different points passive and watchful, and “the future shotgun-toting, chainsaw-wielding queen of postapocalyptic America”.

Naming matters in this novel. There is a worldview debate between Turtle’s daddy and his father, Turtle’s grandpa: do we know a thing by first naming it, or, in order to know it, do we need to approach it with complete openness, study it, examine it, understand it, before we can name? Martin, Turtle’s father, is, in addition to being a “narcissistic sociopath”, an avid reader of philosophy. He tells Turtle she is the Platonic ideal of herself: his perfect imagined survivor. Daniel, Turtle’s grandpa, teaches her to observe and intuit and recognize the truth from her observation.

This isn’t an abstract debate. Martin warns Turtle against allowing other people’s interpretations to corrupt her understanding: he wants his version of the ‘truth’ to remain unchallenged. Challenging Martin’s ‘truth’ could be fatal. Challenging Martin in any way brings painful retribution.
When we meet Turtle, she is wholly Martin’s. She is silent, sad, almost non-verbal. At school, she fails vocabulary tests again and again. She cannot reach for the appropriate words. Her worldview, mirroring Martin’s, is of a hostile, menacing environment. She has no sense that people might care, or cooperate.

When presented with the sentence ‘The _________ enjoyed working with children’, Turtle surmises ‘suspect’. Of course. “The suspect enjoyed working with children”. Turtle, whose father has had sexual relations with her for many years, whose father refuses her any contact with medical professionals or counselors, has no concept that the more obvious choice might be “The paediatrician enjoyed working with children”.

Turtle cannot find appropriate words, so inappropriate words speak for her. She is unable to speak of other girls or women without hissing misogynist violence. Turtle believes these words say everything there is to be said for femaleness, everything there is to be said about her. She believes her father, accepts everything he says. He calls her “kibble”: dog food.
Sometimes, Turtle has an urge to break free, to at least temporarily slip the leash, even knowing she’ll beaten after her day AWOL. On one of these free-range rambles, she encounters two boys, boys lost hiking, and protects them from the elements, maybe saves their lives. If Turtle is to have a life, this might be the moment she saves herself. This is the moment she chooses friendship.

Where will friendship lead?

We know from the outset chaos is coming. We know there must be a showdown. We don’t know who will live or who will die. We realize early on that Turtle needs someone outside herself to fight for; fighting on her own behalf will not be sufficient to survive her father.

Gabriel Tallent loves language and the boys Turtle meets are hyper-verbal. They’re very funny, and their linguistic joking provides much needed relief in an intense, extraordinarily poetic novel, filled with excess language thick like impasto paint technique, like the tidal wave and its debris-filled aftermath that is this narrative’s turning-point episode.

Turtle at times is a cartoon superhero(ine).

“She doesn’t feel cold.”
“Or pain.”
“Only justice.”
“We think she might be a ninja.”
“She denies this.”
“But of course, she’d have to deny it.”
“If she said yes, she was a ninja, we’d know she wasn’t.”
“I wouldn’t describe the ninja theory as definitive, but it’s a live possibility.”
“Anyway, she led us out of the valley of the shadow.”
“She can see in the dark.”
“She can walk across water.”

We can know a thing by looking at it closely and describing it. Then we might name it. Say, “ninja”.

But would we stake our lives on naming truthfully?

I gave this a try because I like "coming of age" stories but just could not get thru this one. While the synopsis does hint at the general theme by describing a "survivalist father," I did not expect the level of depraved violence and vile profanity that starts at the very beginning and never stops. I get what some of the 5 star reviewers are saying and I can see there is a fascinating story here, but it's just a big no for me. Page after page of abuse, incest and obscene language are not my idea of entertainment.

What do you need to know about Turtle Alveston beyond her weird name? Well, she knows her way around almost every firearm there is and she eats raw eggs for breakfast. She is fourteen, but while she goes to school she doesn’t talk and is about to be held back from high school. She lives with her father in the woods of Mendocino. These simple facts might sound like that’s all there is to Turtle and she’s going down fast, but as Gabriel Tallent shows in My Absolute Darling, she is so much more than that.

From the very beginning of My Absolute Darling it’s clear something is not right with Turtle or her living situation. Her father, Martin, waits for the bus with her in the morning and makes her practice shooting playing cards out of his hand. He is quickly revealed as a misogynist survivalist—hence the remote house, guns, rudimentary food and a staggering knowledge of gender-based curse words. Martin is her entire life even though it seems as if he’s either trying to kill her or love her. The outside world plays only a little part in Turtle’s life, but when she comes across two town boys who are not put off by her silence and, in fact, think her outdoor survival skills are amazing, she starts to realize that maybe her father’s view of women, life, and the world are not necessarily true.

For the most part, Tallent’s timing in My Absolute Darling is impeccable. If the klieg lights of Turtle’s reality had hit too early the reader would have been blinded and disbelieving. Instead, he slowly turns up the lights until everything is revealed. By that time, both the reader and Turtle have the emotional resolve to deal with what is before them. Unfortunately, at that point, Tallent loses restraint and the novel goes from creepy and wrong to deadly and dangerous. When I read the book a month ago, I would have said the action became unbelievable, but after the latest events in the U.S. I’m not even sure what that means. The action in the last few chapters is disproportionate to the rest of the novel, but maybe it is completely possible. The only difference is, in the real world I have to accept things as having no explanation and in my fiction I can still draw a line. My Absolute Darling is a challenging novel worth reading, much like Our Endless, Numbered Days and Gather the Daughters, but the culmination of the drama lost me.

If you have read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, you will remember how the evil forces of the house took over her mind gradually and what a tour de force that was. A reviewer for the store was unhappy with the denigrating terms for genitalia, the brutality of it. What I see is the girl's (Turtle's) mind and vocabulary shaped by what she has grown up with. As she lives with a woman hater, she also has cultivated scorn for women. She has done this as a child, and she can grow away from it. The use of language in this way is so subtle and brilliantly formed. A lot has been said on these pages, but I'll say best sellers are mostly over-hyped for me, and this was an exception. Yes the subject matter is brutal, but I've read literally hundreds of YA's that are "about" a topic such as child abuse or rape, and they aren't literature to me. This book is. The subject matter it covers is secondary to the incredible character of Turtle, who should be much different person, but she is so strong and resourceful that she is able to make her own way. The characterization is fabulous, and I someday will read it again to take in the meaning of the flora in this book. Also, the "silver" that she experiences in many nature situations. I disagree that the conversation is anything less that perfectly lifelike. As with the actions in this book, cooking, cleaning guns, repairing items...all seem organic to the characters and the lush setting of this part of California, amazingly described with a hundred words I've never heard of.

This was a dark, disturbing and difficult to read book, but I could not rate it as anything less than five stars. As hard as it was to read this book, and at times it was so difficult that I had to put it down and come back, I have rarely come across a fictional character that has invaded my mind in such a pervasive way as Turtle did,not only while I was reading her story, but for some time afterwards.
My Absolute Darling is the story of 14 year old Turtle (Julia) who lives with her violent, abusive survivalist father in rural isolation. The things Turtle knows most, and understands best are guns, when it comes to people, her father has twisted her thinking so much that she has become an aggressive,angry ball of hatred and misogyny. The strange mix of love and hate she feels for him eventually comes to a head in a tense and dramatic fashion that will change both their lives forever.
Turtle is a complex, frustrating character, which makes her all the more interesting to read about, and while Martin, her father is clearly the villain of the piece, we do learn something about what may have made him become this terrible person,though it is never at the expense of our understanding that at his core is a despicable, mean and violent man.
One of the most interesting things about the writing in the book was the inclusion of numerous passages about the beauty of nature, and the juxtaposition of natures beauty and Martins so called "nurture" of Turtle is always evident.
This book is definitely not an easy read, but it is a worthwhile one, and one I am glad I finished, though I am sure it will stay with me for a long long time.

*Trigger Warning: Child Abuse/Sexual Abuse*

An impossibly brave girl, her abusive father and the relationship they have between them will keep you turning the pages but it’s brutal and raw and gut-wrenching at times.

The title might suggest affection, but it’s the twisted “affection” that this father displays for his fourteen-old that will have you squirming every time he enters the room. Friends, this was a tough read. Why so tough? Because as you might not guess, the girl, known as Turtle, loves her father deeply. She realizes at a very young age that they are both damaged and there is a beauty in that. A beauty that is constantly evaluated as these two co-exist in a town, that for the most part, turns a blind eye to what is going on.

How can two damaged people survive without one another? Is it even possible? That is the question and the author does a very good job of presenting the love/hate relationship that these two have. I actually caught myself pitying the father at one point. And for every ounce of pity I had for him, I had the same amount of anger for Turtle. I caught myself putting some of the blame on her and then I’d put the book down and sit there shaking my head over it.

This author wrings all the feelings out of you. For those who have read the book, I’m not sure the ending worked for me but thinking about it, I’m not sure what exactly I’d change if I could.

As I noted at the top of this review, this book could be a trigger for anyone who suffered from child abuse or sexual abuse of any kind and it’s not clearly noted anywhere in the blurbs I’ve read.

My Absolute Darling has what I would call one of the most complex protagonists ever. Turtle is damn near feral but she’s so vulnerable and fragile too. If you can stomach the abuse that she suffers, then you will be rewarded with beautiful prose. At times I was reminded of A Little Life which gut-punched me over and over again.

A profoundly disturbing story of young Turtle (Julia) who dwells in Mendocino an America's west coast an area of outstanding natural beauty with dense forests and a rugged coastline. In deep contrast to this utopian scene Turtle lives alone with her father Martin who, although he expresses his undying love for her, feels the need to rape her in a never ending cycle of loathsome self pity. This is her guardian, the one entrusted to care for her, and because of these despicable acts Turtle cannot comprehend her feelings towards him, she both loves and loathes him in equal measures. The controlling influence of the father creates some frightening and upsetting scenes to read: The child is forced to complete a number of pull-ups from a rafter and when she lowers her body Martin holds a knife beneath her..."Then he raised the knife and lays the blade up between her legs."....."The knife bites into the blue denim of her jeans and Turtle feels the cold steel through her panties."

Turtle meets and befriends a boy called Jacob and she begins to understand that kindness and friendship can exist even in a world where despicable acts are performed on a daily basis. As she returns home one evening she notices that her home has a new lodger a young child Cayenne and realizes now as she is almost a teenager, Martin has acquired a new defenceless child, to fulfil his sickening sexual desires. Can Turtle escape the claws of this evil monster? Can she rescue Cayenne before it is too late? This is at times a very difficult story to read as the author paints a picture of an unsettling family life against a picturesque and idyllic backdrop. I was captivated by both the innocence and evil and found myself reading this story in a very short time. Many thanks to the good people at netgalley for a gratis copy in exchange for an honest review and that is what I have written.

I started out liking this story invested in what was going to happen to Turtle. How and when would she break with her father who abuses her physically, sexually and emotionally? None of the adults at the edges of her life believed the dad's weird, rambling stories which relieved me but what stuck in my craw was that none of them ever thought to bring a social worker to their house? But okay fine for the sake of the story I can let that go I want to see Turtle decide and choose for herself to get help.

The first big hit to the book was the dialogue for the two teenage boys in the story. I get this was meant to be natural and imitate the lingo of the current young teens and adults (myself included in that age group) but it was painful for the fact the boys spoke in non-stop silliness. Out of place though it may seem teens and young adults do speak in more than just memes and hashtags. Sadly these boys never broke out of that making it embarrassing and unrealistic to read even for someone who uses that lingo.
Second (and completely my own personal taste in writing style) was the embellished descriptions of everything. Everything. From the scenery, to the guns, to shooting the guns, to the house, to Turtle's emotions. Without a doubt I could see in my mind's eye the picture being painted but it was dense and after a time I started skipping lines and pages just to keep the pace moving.
Third it was just plain unsatisfying. I was just so tired of reading through all this dense writing by the last fifty pages I didn't care if the dad killed Turtle or she escaped. The story seem to be dragging by the end.

I'm in the minority that hated this book on very many levels.

I couldn't agree more with the reviewer calling for an editor. Good grief, entire chapters could be omitted without damaging the story line. And those lyrical passages describing the scenery. Some gorgeous writing but far too much of it.

There is a lot that is left to the imagination here about why dad is such a psychopath. He accuses his dad of being a murderous psychopath, but our heroine sees him as her potential saviour until the poor fellow dies in a totally over-the-top scene. Why are these two men living in squalour when they seem in the past to have had substantial financial resources? Never explained. How can Turtle be slow at school but have interior monologues worthy of characters by Virginia Woolf. How do two 9th grade students manage to talk as if they were Oxford University students out of "Brideshead Revisited".

Violence. Only in America do firearms acquire the status of characters. Is it really necessary to describe in such brutal detail the rapes, mutilation, beatings. even unnecessary amputation. Language. I am no prude, but I was stunned by the constant use of foul language. Dad is an educated man who reads philosophical treatises. Surely his vocabulary isn't limited to filth when he's arguing with his daughter.

Based on the glowing reviews I forced myself to read to the end but I did skip through a lot. Even the ending has a gruesome retelling of Turtle's injuiries and surgeries.

My impression was that the author purposely decided on shock value. Didn't work for me. I felt dirty reading this book, almost like kiddie porn. But apparently quite a few people found it uplifting. Go figure.

I couldn't get even halfway through this. I found the dialogue unbelievable and the teenagers' behavior unbelievable. But mostly, it was the scenes of molestation (rape) that are far too disturbing. I question the author's goal in writing them the way he did (and I'll leave it at that:) I also got tired of all the guns and knives. This could have been a well-told story in the hands of someone more gentle/sympathetic/discerning.

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.

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!

This a look into the chilling life of a 14-year old girl, Julia (Turtle) Alveston. Following the death of her mother, she lives alone with an emotionally volatile, violent, abusive father in a ramshackle house. Until his death, her grandfather lived in a nearby trailer, and was her only safe refuge. Her mentally unstable father is a survivalist, teaching Turtle how to use firearms and knives to protect herself from the inevitable evil forces that will descend on them.

Sadly, middle school is yet another place where Turtle doesn't feel safe. There is cruelty and bullying, and academics are difficult given her home life. When Turtle meets two teenaged boys during an overnight escape in the woods near her home, she slowly experiences feelings that are normal for her age despite her father's sociopathic hold on her. Her father's unexpected absence allows her to explore a world previously unknown with serious consequences for everyone.

A discordant note in this otherwise wonderfully written novel are the erudite conversations between the boys. In my experience, young teenaged boys are not interested in, or capable of, conversations of that depth. I also had to suspend disbelief that even an untrained eye would detect signs of abuse and then not report it to Child Protective Services.

Gabriel Tallent has evidenced an amazing gift for revealing the internal thoughts and conflicting emotions of this captivating character, Turtle. This is an author to watch.

4.5. Unbelievably heart wrenching, tragic, and disturbing, yet what an incredible read! Notwithstanding the extraordinarily difficult subject matter, I could not put this book down. Among other things, the story is generally focused on child abuse and incest, with its tragic consequences and impact on a young adolescent girl, Turtle (Julia), raised by her deeply disturbed and tortured survivalist single father, Martin. The family lives in a rat infested totally run down hovel near Mendocino, California that apparently was once a lovely and well cared for home that was built by Martin’s family and had been handed down through generations. The story goes into extraordinary detail of their life living in the backwoods, both Martin and Turtle skilled in many kinds of guns and in the natural landscape. Although their life is very spartan, for example breakfast consisting of Turtle eating eggs fresh from the shell and her father drinking beer, and Turtle sleeping on the floor, they live near the upscale Mendocino area where many of the kids Turtle goes to school with live. Turtle lives in a very different world than her peers which contributes to her isolation but there is some comic relief when she befriends two boys, Jacob and Brett. Turtle is the real survivor and the story takes us through her tumultuous journey.

I do not know if it was intentional, but the nickname Turtle is a good one to describe the heroine. This book was extremely hard to read, similar in a way to A Little Life by Hana Yanagihara by the devastatingly tragic topics, but this one was a page turner. The detailed prose is magnificent and I felt like I was right there experiencing their lives, the smells, the woods and the rugged coastline. In his debut novel, Gabriel Tallent, has a winner.

My Absolute Darling is a powerful, dizzying account of a contemporary teenage girl named Turtle growing up in rural Mendocino in the shadow of her intellectually omnivorous, endlessly emotionally manipulative father who believes the end of the civilized world is imminent and hence trains 14-year-old Turtle in a relentless regime of survivalist arts. This tour de force is not for the faint of heart. First-time novelist Gabriel Tallent has an acute talent (pardon the pun) for imagining parental cruelty and Turtle’s broken emotional interiority; I confess I’ve never before experienced a literary novel that succeeded in making me feel queasy while reading it. See, for example, the account of a kitchen floor, home-made un-anesthetized surgery involving, among other things, a pair of pliers.

Nevertheless, this book is about survival (though not of the end-of-the-world variety) and has so many rewards, it is worth the difficult passages. Start with the characters. Turtle is scrappy, stunted, well-armed, self-destructive, feral, and utterly devoted to her brutal father Martin. Martin—who is the villain of this novel—is drawn with exquisite care: he is handsome, charismatic, abusive, misogynist by any standard, foul-mouthed, charming, brilliant, and philosophical. Never does he become a caricature either of the abusive father or end-of-world, off-the-grid kook. Indeed, Tallent draws him with such sympathy that the reader wishes relentlessly for his reformation rather than his destruction.

So what’s it about? In a nutshell, My Absolute Darling describes Martin’s harrowing descent into self-pitying frustration: his life isn’t going right, the world is ending, his wife is dead, and his relationship with his alcoholic father sucks. He spends most of his time reading philosophy, drinking beer, collecting firearms, and pitilessly teaching Turtle how to protect herself when civilization collapses (oh, and raping her). Turtle, on the other hand, is beginning to escape pure self-loathing and discovering boys (both as crushes and friends). Turtle navigating her on-again, off-again escape from Martin’s jealousy is what drives this narrative forward (amongst plenty of gunfire).

The gifts Tallent puts on display in My Absolute Darling are prodigous. He creates emotionally taut and often funny dialogue; generously skewers hippy-dippy first-names-only off-the-grid Northern California-ism; describes a verdant and wild coastal Mendocino countryside; and provides a rushing, watching-a-train-wreck narrative drive toward a terrible inevitable end. His take on the dude-rich banter of precocious, over-educated teens is generous and never mean. He is a writer of great sympathy – for nature, for the fragility of teenage emotional life, for the fragility of aging Northern California nudists, and even for Martin.

I was unprepared for how good this book would be. It should also come with trigger warnings for rape, incest and violence. The author writes very beautifully about the natural environment of California, including detailed descriptions of flora. I listened to the audio version and the narration is brilliant, I cannot stress this enough. I don't know if I could have gotten through the print version because of the brutality, narcissism and manipulation of the abusive father, but the fine narration kept me going and I felt mesmerized. Turtle is 14 when the story opens and she loves her abuser very much, which is not unusual, especially since she has been groomed for her life of abuse since she was a baby. It is not so common to see such a portrait of how incestuous and violent men can be, and how resilient and brilliant women can be, whether they survive or not. Turtle is in for the fight of her life, and all the things she learned from her abuser are the weapons in her arsenal. I was really turned off by some of the similarly-brutal Oprah books, but the vignettes of life in this book saved it for me. The sparkling dialogue between the two boys, the sprouts on the counter, the giant Redwoods, etc. I lived in Northern California in the late 1970's and early 1980's and it rings true to me.

I wanted to DNF this book at too many moments but didn't, I should have. Turtle is 14 years old and lives with her father in a very remote lifestyle. He emotionally, physically and sexually abuses her. He has broken her to believe he is all she has. At one point in the book he leaves her alone for three months and I thought this would be the moment Turtle tells someone what has been happening to her but no. Her father returns with another little girl. His intentions are clear. The question is whether Turtle will stop him before he does the same to her. This is a detail-oriented story. It is physically exhausting to listen to the narrative. The animal abuse and physical abuse is mind rotting to hear.

What an absolute nightmare of a novel. The plot was so slow and borderline non existent. This is basically a Lifetime movie in written form that uses long paragraphs and prosaic descriptions to try and appear more sophisticated. All the characters consistently made bad decisions in horribly complicated scenarios. I am shocked that this book is getting so many accolades because it was so painful to get through. I rarely state this, but this novel has no redeeming qualities.

This one really hurts! I don’t remember reading anything this raw or distressing in a long time, and that includes A Little Life. The story is focused on Turtle Alverston, a 14-year-old girl who is unknowingly trapped in a life of abuse in Northern California. A mix of Bear Grylls, Mowgli and Jo from Little Women, she is totally primordial and lives in a constant state of fight-or-flight. Her father, Martin, is the abuser (trigger warning) and he is one of the most complex monsters I have ever read. I don’t want to say too much more because the turns this book takes are truly shocking and ugly. But the writing is really, really good and the story has the bones of a classic. Maybe I’ve been prone to hyperbole with some of my previous reviews but take my word on this one (so long as you like dark and horrifying tales). Out at the end of August.

This novel about child physical and sexual abuse is as raw, gritty and hardcore as anything I've ever read. It had me stunned by its power and depth, by its ugliness and truth. The author has a rare understanding of victims, especially how their desire to be loved by the abuser has them returning for more abuse because that is what they know. The abuse is predictable and real as nothing else is. The victim understands the rules - shame, secrecy and silence. Their own self-loathing and love/hatred for the abuser becomes a way of life, a way to turn things inward, a way to make understood that which is not understandable.

Fourteen year-old Turtle lives with Martin, her father, in Mendocino, California. She is adept at shooting targets with any type of fire arm and is prepared for attack by any outside forces. She lives with a survivalist mentality that Martin has structured all around her. Their home is almost bare and Turtle hears the rats chomp on their left-overs at night, at least on those nights when Martin doesn't carry her to his bed.

The narrative about sexual abuse is as true and as horrific as any I've read in fiction. "His touch brings her skin to life, and she holds it all within the private theater of her mind." "He believes her body to be something that he understands, and, treacherously, it is." What is often the worst experience for victims is their own body's betrayal as it responds viscerally to the abuser. Turtle hates what her body appears to enjoy.

Turtle's life is isolated except for school where she appears to be behind academically. She has no friends and she refuses to see the school counselor. When Martin is called to the principal's office because Turtle's teacher has concerns, he is able to side-step any of their suggestions. It appears that the disastrous conditions of Turtle's existence will continue. However, Martin doesn't plan on Turtle meeting Jacob, forming a close and intimate bond with him, and being exposed to his family and the outside world, a world where people thrive.

Turtle has the survival skills of a modern-day Rambo but her belief in herself has been formed by self-hatred. She knows her way around guns and the wilderness and there are times when she thinks about escaping the life she's in. She is torn between having promised Martin that she won't run away and her own desire for a different life. As the physical and sexual abuse mount, Turtle's life is crumbling away.

This novel is dark, very dark, and if your stomach is weak, I don't recommend it. However, if you want to discover a wonderful new writer and read a book that doesn't veer from truth, even in its most difficult form, read 'My Absolute Darling' by Gabriel Tallent.

I hate giving less than a four star review because what I usually think is that if the book is less than four stars that isn't about the book but about the match between me and the book. That's the story here. I had read positive reviews on My Absolute Darling and I was especially interested because I know the Mendocino area well. Couldn't wait to read it. But it turned out not to be a match for me.

The writing is, at times, poetic and full of rich imagery. I was intrigued by the characters and somewhat committed to them but not committed enough to actually finish the book. What happened? It was too slow. I got bogged down repeatedly. I just wanted the story to pick up and move along. But I own that. I am propelled, first and foremost, by the characters in a story. Secondly, I am driven by the plot. I want things to move along. I had to wait too much and got irritated. So, I put it down about half way through.

Read it for the richness of the text. Read it for the complex characters. Don't read it if you prefer a middle to fast paced story.

Absolutely loathsome, and not interestingly so, this makes A Little Life look like a masterpiece of subtlety, sensitivity and gentility (I never thought I'd say that, since I disliked ALL!)
Despite wordy descriptions of the countryside, TEDIOUS details on guns & ammo & cleaning thereof--not to mention jarringly specific brand and author name-droppings (first Turtle "is wearing Levi's [sic] over black Icebreaker wool tights" and then she's "pulling Carhartts over her Smartwool long underwear"; Middlemarch, Marcus Aurelius, Proust and all sorts of high-end books are mentioned) the descriptions were confusing and monotonous, and there was was remarkably little sense of place or palpable difference in the characters. The author was showing off his knowledge of plant vocabulary and literature (and, oh yes, guns, always with the guns!) and sounding 'poetic', but there was not enough interiority of character or believable psychology--or even exterior description--for me to distinguish between the 2 boys, or the 'nice' hippie-stereotype teachers/mothers.
It's not that I don't believe that backwoods monsters like the father exist, or that his daughter could be profoundly abused and also love him, but somehow I didn't buy the dialogue, neither the ostensibly 'humorous' banter between the boys, nor Turtle's internal monologues of self-loathing.
Beyond a level narrative closure (wanting to see if she got out of it alive) I stopped caring, and despite being a person who loves 1) words 2) learning about areas beyond my scope through a narrative story 3) medical/surgical descriptions, I found the endless guns and dank plant life unutterably wearisome (I started skimming over these early on) and the surgery/medical descriptions callous, revolting and monotonous at the same time.
The author perhaps was attempting to humanize his anti-hero (or promote his own libertarian ethos, or add interest in the story?) by inserting stuff about climate change, hippy pot-growers, capitalist off-the-grid techies, which all came off as both too specific and too generic to be anything other than dull, stereotyped and patronizing.
When it all ended it up in a shoot-em-up teen-prom-party with a super-hero 'survivor' girl saving the day (lots of guns, lots of shooting, but boring to read because it was actually very unclear who was where, who was doing what; this was also true of the foul sex scenes, which were sadistically descriptive yet oddly unclear, and NOT because the author was drawing a veil), I guess that was not that surprising. Or that cathartic.
And don't get me started on the annoying use of the present tense. It seems to be a fashion these days, to evoke "immediacy" or some crap like that.
I want my money and my time BACK!

I received his book as a gift and it seemed, at first, to be something that I would be interested in. But I’m 6 chapters in and I honesty do not have any idea of what the actual plot is ( though from reviews I’ve gathered what it’s intended to be). The story, so far, is slow moving. The author over describes everything- and his editor has done him and the book a disservice by letting him go on and on about mundane details in order to set scenes.... it’s erroneous. Even the main character has 3 names...? She is called kibble by her father, Julia at school, and Turtle. How many names does one character need?

I have read from other reviewers that the plot regarding her father is he is anticipating the apocalypse so he is preparing as such and training Turtle as well. There is nothing that makes that clear so far, I just thought they were poor and gun obsessed, the way the father allows for guns and target practice in the house just meant to me they he didn’t care much for whatever shack they were living in, not that he was hiding from civilization in order to prepare for the end of the world.

The most shocking part is, of course, the incestual relationship between Turtle and her father. And the author doesn’t ease you in either, the rape is in the first chapter.

I also cannot stomach how the author has, in some ways, dumbed down his female lead. Her father is raping her, she is an expert marksman, I know she loves him but hates but come on.... I want to yell “fight for yourself, kill him!”. It ultimately just hurts my heart that this character, this girl, may or may not know this is wrong.... that her entire life is wrong ...if it gets better later on in the book I may never know, not sure I’ll finish.

Do yourself a favor and avoid this book. The themes are messed up and it just drags on and on.

Just finished "My Absolute Darling." I trust Nicholas Kristoff, NPR, and NYT. but did not agree with them about the "greatness" of this book. In fact, I'm disappointed with their comments. The theme of incestuous abuse is an important one, gritty and painful as it is. However, I found the violence, especially in the final climatic scene, and throughout the book to Turtle (the protagonist), to be gratuitous--"written by a man into violence for its own sake," I kept thinking as I read it. True, there are evocative descriptions of the N. California setting, but they interrupted the flow of the story, almost as if they were pasted on afterwards, and given their locations, were too long. And why was was the father's name for Turtle, "Kibble," not capitalized? Was she not worthy, was there some literary reason for this, or was it careless line-editing? I agree that the story kept one reading (though I found myself skimming), but I did not finish the book with that good feeling that I was a bit ahead in life.

I'm giving this 3 stars because the writing is borderline fabulous. But getting through it is *such* a slog. As you will know from the bazillion other reviews, the book is about teenaged Turtle and her relationship with Martin, her stunningly abusive, brilliant, violent, resentful, often psychotic, constantly heat-packing, rapist father. Every page where Marin appears is a trial, and that's about 65% of the book. When Turtle is not confronting him, she spends time with her Grandfather, who apart from what he did in Korea and Vietnam appears to be a nice old guy (Martin does not agree!), her wannabe boyfriend Jacob and his friend Brett (two incredibly well-read precocious 9th graders), and 10 year old Cayenne (a girl Martin picked up on a road trip and decided to keep). Most of that stuff is OK and gives one hope that Turtle will see her way clear of her situation. And eventually... but it's Such A LONG, LONG time coming.
Parenthetically, I wonder how the brains work of authors who grittley and ruthlessly portray serial killers killing and abusive parents abusing, etc. I wonder if they can turn on and off the mechanisms that allow them to do this? Is it personal with them or abstract? As hard as it is to read this stuff, what's it like creating it?

Hard to believe all the positive hype for this book. One earlier review nailed it: this is gun porn (and misogyny) at its worst. Characters are constantly holding, draping, stroking, sliding, oiling, fondling and inserting their guns and knives -- yeesh, not a shred of subtlety here at all. Every bit of symbolism, including the ludicrous "garden" at the end, is sledge-hammered home. To enjoy this book, you must relish wholly pretentious description and dialogue (no one alive, especially kids aged 9 to16, has EVER talked like this, even with all the f-words and "Dude"s tossed in); intensely evil scenes of torture and child abuse, rape and incest; and two seemingly endless, utterly illogical and totally unrealistic "action" beach scenes, one in the middle of the book to show that Turtle can only succeed when she can out-Rambo any man and one at the bloody climax to the whole mess. This is an intense and unlikable book.

I heard glowing reviews on NPR, but I am SO glad that I didn't buy this book, but borrowed it from our library. This book was compared in reviews to "To Kill a Mockingbird" which is often a bad sign. Well, perhaps if Atticus had repeatedly raped Scout? Pretty disgusting, right? I didn't find the writing particularly good either. This Gabriel actually shows no Tallent at all. I'll be very cautious about NPR reviews in the future, that's for sure.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I gave it three stars because the author is obviously very talented, but by the second half of his book, he took it way over the top, and any tension I felt between Turtle and her daddy was completely gone. Initially, I was gripped by the premise. And, even though the subject of extreme violence and incest is not at all my cup of tea, the author kept my attention with some very skilled writing and storytelling. And, the power struggle/love manipulation between Turtle and her daddy was deeply disturbing. But - the author completely lost me when Turtle leaves home, and interacts with the outside world. Inane and pseudo-intellectual dialogue between the shallow characters that Turtle bonds with was unrealistic and boring. However, the relationship between Turtle and Grandfather (and, Turtle's teacher, Anna) were sensitively written and, at times, riveting. But, ultimately, I was not truly pulled into the author's fictive dream, so I flipped through the second half, and was glad I didn't invest more time in it.

This is an unforgettable, but greatly overly-written first novel. The characterization is mesmerizing; vulnerable Turtle and her heinous father will forever remain in my mind. Like others, I had to put the book down several times to come up for air. Ultimately, the often unrealistic plot raised more questions than it answered—one being, why was the police never called by anyone, particularly during the novel’s final most violent scenes? I'm also sorry that the important themes of natural beauty, caring for things, and redemption were greatly overshadowed by Martin's twisted mind and horrific actions. But though flawed, like an unending nightmare, this novel will stay with me.

My Absolute Darling was a painful, coming of age story which takes place in northern California near Mendocino. Fourteen year old Turtle Alveston is somewhat of a wild child but she has a good reason. Her mother died and her father, Martin, is whacked. She goes to school but her grades are poor and she doesn't have any real friends. She detests most girls and women that she meets and although she seems to know that the way her father treats her is wrong (he physically and sexually abuses her), he is all she knows. The reality begins to set in for Turtle after her grandfather dies and her father takes off only to return home with a ten year old girl he has picked up and seems to be thinking about her as his almost grown daughter's replacement.

This book told in the third person and is a tough read. It's very detailed when it comes to the physical abuse Turtle endured. The writing is good but, seemed very slow at times as well. Definitely not a book all readers will be glad they read.

This is one of those stories that are hard to forget. Turtle is a young 14 year old girl living with her recluse father off the grid in Northern California. Her grandfather is her one hope for a savior when the book begins.

She is almost a feral human as she knows the creatures of the woods better than other human beings. She is a crack shot and almost obsessive in her cleaning of her guns. She is also being sexually abused by her father.

When she meets Jacob, a boy a few years older than her, she discovers life outside her own cocoon. What will her father do when he discovers her secrets? Will she survive his anger?

This book has been called a Huck Finn story and also a coming of age book. It is both of these. Here is a girl who has nothing going for her, except her fierce nature and her will to find something better. It is a tale of survival.

I recommend this book for people who enjoy different novels, because this one is not for the faint of heart. It will stay with you forever.

This book is AWFUL!!! From the amount of profanity the author used one would think she had a small vocabulary, but she was careful to use every big word she knew to prove otherwise. The subject matter was disgusting. She also wanted to let the reader know that she could describe every plant and land formation in that area of California. Ignore the fake 5 star reviews. I wouldn't have given it one star if I had a choice.

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 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.

I received an e-galley from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, through Edelweiss.

This book is beautiful, intense, and heartbreaking. I have to admit, I was initially turned off by the flowery language, but I got over that very quickly. The story of Turtle and her amazing survival drew me in by the second or third chapter. This is one of those books that you can't stop thinking about, long after you have finished it. I read this book at night before bed, and it would keep me awake. I would think about it the next day at work. It disturbed me to no end, but was absolutely worth it.
That all being said, I have been struggling to find someone I can personally recommend this book to. This is no beach read. There are graphic scenes of rape and violence throughout. This is not a book you read to escape reality. However, the feelings this book invoked in me, of terror, hatred, and then hope and redemption, made this book very satisfying. Most books I read, I forget about very quickly. They are just a means to pass the time. This book, however, will stay with me for a long time. It is a masterpiece.

Unforgettable. This book grabs you up and won't let go, even as you know what horror is coming you cannot look away. Turtle stole my heart, she is simply a wonderful character, and Martin- my God what a terrible, believable monstrous human being.
The prose is stunning, the surrounding landscape of Mendicino is a character in its own right, and as soon as I finished the book I wanted to read it again.
The only complaint I have about this novel is that the ending could be considered slightly contrived, but I didn't care, I just loved Turtle so much.
This is a story I will never forget, my favorite book of this year hands down.

This book is really hard to read at times - but it’s so well done it’s impossible to put down. I read it in a few days and talked about it a lot, which I rarely do. I was just so affected by Turtle’s story, by her super dark and intense story. I loved how instead of using first person narration or having the characters talk about feelings Tallent let the emotions come through in the characters actions (particularly Turtle, constantly cleaning her guns, but also Martin opening his morning beer or Jacob’s family taking Turtle shopping for bras). It was written in a unique way that I found unexpectedly satisfying. It’s a coming of age story, a bit of a thriller even, and a close look at a deeply troubled/abusive father/daughter relationship. It’s not a fun book and it’s not an easy one, and I think some (honest but difficult to read) elements of the subject matter (abuse, incest) could be too much for some readers. If you can handle it (and the abuse is described in some detail) I would highly recommend this book.

4/5. I went into this book not really knowing what this book would be about. This book is dark and it blew me away. It did take some time to get into it and I was trying to understand the viewpoint of Turtle. Then, this book got really interesting and dark. I felt so bad for Turtle and wanted to tell her to listen to herself and yes, what was happening was bad, but I understand her actions. I was on the edge of my seat for the last 100 pages of the book. I just want more closure on the ending, but I understand why the author wrote that ending. Overall, this book was very well written and gives hope to those who are lost and don't know themselves as a person, don't let the bad things in life weigh you down and there is light at the end of the tunnel. It was a slow beginning, but a great end.

I picked up two books this week. Interestingly both were “endorsed” by Stephen King. The first was a disappointment, but this one lived up to the hype. That said, this book was grueling, dark and deep. Not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination. I squirmed in my seat several times, uncomfortable with what was unfolding on the pages in front of me. The writing was rich and painted a vivid, if cold and dangerous, landscape. Turtle’s world was out of step with our day to day lives. Sometimes she would intersect with “normality” only to see it spotlighted as a world she could only visit briefly. Her pain and shame were palpable. I read this book in a single 8 hour sitting. Compelling and gripping for sure. Easy now way. Ultimately hopefully? You be the judge.

This is a wonderful first novel by the aptly named Gabriel Tallent. It tells the story of a young teenage girl whose horrible father abuses and isolates her in ways that make it difficult for her to adjust or even fathom the magnitude of the maltreatment. His stated affection and love for her complicates her ability to adjust to the normal world of school and friends as she moves from childhood to adolescence. Her thoughts and character are exquisitely defined by Mr. Tallent’s writing and one roots for her to escape from the horrible father she loves and trusts. There are significant descriptions of flora and firearms as well as literary references that are difficult to appreciate if not a cognoscenti. But that is part of the beauty of this novel with rich descriptions and connections between the heroine, animals, firearms, school, boys, the ocean, the wild and other aspects of her life. A good read.

What an AWFUL and ugly voice of narration done by, what's her name? Alex McKenna!
She should definitely stay away for giving her voice to do book-reading. I swear I could hear the vibrations of her vocal cords. I've found myself cringing all the time while I struggle listening to her disgusting presentation/reading.
With all due respect Alex McKenna, stay away from this career and look for something else less harmful to your poor audience.
I am stuck here and struggling to go through such a wonderful/highly anticipated book because of the terrible presentation you did when recording your voice. Please please, stay away from doing any other book. You'd kill all the joy of a book.

It seems this writer thought, " I'll do something unrelentingly vicious and grim, drawing it out so the reader pulls hair from their head and gouges out their own eyeballs to get through the thing." Each ugly, violent incident (i.e. everything that happens) is prolonged for pages while our heroine tries to decide whether to keep living as a sex slave or not. After endless skimming I was begging her to pull the trigger on either her father or herself and get it over with. I got enough description of horrible wounds and injuries- usually inflicted violently- to last for a very long time. In fact, that was pretty much the whole book.
There have got to be better "dark atmospheric" choices out there than this thing.

I borrowed this from the library based on rave reviews. I read either to learn about a subject or be entertained or both. There's nothing entertaining about child rape, incest and abuse. I stopped reading it as soon as the first rape incident was described. It's a sick book and I wonder about the mental state of someone who would write this type of book.

I cannot believe that this book got the reviews it did. Maybe it is something like the story of the Emperor's clothes...... Everybody who is anybody in the literary circles praised the book and so everybody follows suit. For me it is the most sexist book I have ever read and it is also completely tone deaf. Apart from the over-writing style of the author, the whole book is a complete mess. There is an almost pleasure and glee with how the rape and incest scenes are described and although the author has done a lot of research about guns, the overwrought prose and excessive use of violence and rape for shock value (?) or literary praise gave me a feel of deep unease. The grim reality of women and girls living this hell, makes this book particularly distasteful as well as disrespectful of their struggle and suffering. If I could this book would not even get one start.

I've only read the first few chapters and I'm ready to quit. I agree with the other one-star reviewers: it is grossly overwritten. After a while, the endless descriptions of every plant, creature and rock have the opposite effect of what the author was probably trying to achieve. He shoves so much description down our throats that the reader doesn't have enough space to create his or her own mental picture. Its boring, repetitive, excessive and unnecessary. The author is simply trying way, way too hard, which makes him sound like an amateur. And then of course there's the cliched characters, the misogyny, the pornographic rape scenes... it all adds up to a soul-depleting read. Yuck!

This book may want to make you throw up.
A very horrific story line - child abuse, incest, violence.
Likely you will want to finish reading it - hoping fervently that
the ending will provide some relief for the painful beginning and middle.
The setting - omg - the woods will never feel good to you again.
Wild radish may cause you to break out in fear!
Ugh - just did not like this book but read it to the end.
Credit needs to be given to the author for a well written piece of work, a bare style with excruciating details.

This is the hardest review I have had to write this year, mainly because I read too many reviews from other people before even reading the book. People love it, people hate it.. Whatever way on the fence they are, very few are going: "Meh, that was alright like". That in itself is exciting I think, so when I got a chance to read it in return for a review I was not only excited to see what the hype was about, but how I was going to sit on that fence.

To start, I wasn't overly impressed. There was so much description of everything ,that it took me forever to get through a page trying to put pictures to all these words:
The sun has risen a hands breadth above the horizon, crowning the eastern hills, sheaves of light slanting through the stunted trees. The road winds out below her, following a ridge with thickly wooded gulches on either side. She eases along, stopping to watch the silk-burrows of spiders in the cut bank, raking through grass for the grass-colored mantises, turning over roadside stones.
Beautiful huh? but page after page after page.. it gets a bit tedious.

The story (If you somehow have missed hearing about it) follows Turtle, 14, living in a rundown part of a small Californian cost with her mentally, physically and sexually abusive father. The author takes you right in there and there is no escaping the details of the abuse, but somehow he didn't manage to convince me, the way he portrait the abuse felt like I was reading about an abusive relationship between an unrelated woman and a man and not a child/father. I read one review were the person said that if the author really wanted to do something new and had wanted too avoid too sexualize Turtle, he would have written the MC as a boy/son in the same scenario and not a girl.. And I agree.

Turtle meets Jacob and Brett, two boys with the most unrealistic vocabulary imaginable (This didn't bug me) and they become a little gang and have adventures and there are hints towards some light romantic feelings. I read a lot of reviews that didn't like this aspect but I felt it was needed, it gave her character time to grow and change and become stronger.

I really liked the book and the fact that this review was hard to write, that I had to think about how I felt because I wasn't sure.

Tallent's writing attains great beauty when he describes nature, but the plotting in this book left me cold. I so wanted to like Turtle, but she abandoned Cayenne to enormous violence. The gender of the author is clear and not flattering. Women do not describe their own anatomies in the prurient way he uses. I also did not need to know so much about guns and their mechanics. I don't think the images this will leave in your head are worth the read.

This is a wonderful first novel by the aptly named Gabriel Tallent. It tells the story of a young teenage girl whose horrible father abuses and isolates her in ways that make it difficult for her to adjust or even fathom the magnitude of the maltreatment. His stated affection and love for her complicates her ability to adjust to the normal world of school and friends as she moves from childhood to adolescence. Her thoughts and character are exquisitely defined by Mr. Tallent’s writing and one roots for her to escape from the horrible father she loves and trusts. There are significant descriptions of flora and firearms as well as literary references that are difficult to appreciate if not a cognoscenti. But that is part of the beauty of this novel with rich descriptions and connections between the heroine, animals, firearms, school, boys, the ocean, the wild and other aspects of her life. A good read.

What an AWFUL and ugly voice of narration done by, what's her name? Alex McKenna!
She should definitely stay away for giving her voice to do book-reading. I swear I could hear the vibrations of her vocal cords. I've found myself cringing all the time while I struggle listening to her disgusting presentation/reading.
With all due respect Alex McKenna, stay away from this career and look for something else less harmful to your poor audience.
I am stuck here and struggling to go through such a wonderful/highly anticipated book because of the terrible presentation you did when recording your voice. Please please, stay away from doing any other book. You'd kill all the joy of a book.

It seems this writer thought, " I'll do something unrelentingly vicious and grim, drawing it out so the reader pulls hair from their head and gouges out their own eyeballs to get through the thing." Each ugly, violent incident (i.e. everything that happens) is prolonged for pages while our heroine tries to decide whether to keep living as a sex slave or not. After endless skimming I was begging her to pull the trigger on either her father or herself and get it over with. I got enough description of horrible wounds and injuries- usually inflicted violently- to last for a very long time. In fact, that was pretty much the whole book.
There have got to be better "dark atmospheric" choices out there than this thing.

I borrowed this from the library based on rave reviews. I read either to learn about a subject or be entertained or both. There's nothing entertaining about child rape, incest and abuse. I stopped reading it as soon as the first rape incident was described. It's a sick book and I wonder about the mental state of someone who would write this type of book.

I cannot believe that this book got the reviews it did. Maybe it is something like the story of the Emperor's clothes...... Everybody who is anybody in the literary circles praised the book and so everybody follows suit. For me it is the most sexist book I have ever read and it is also completely tone deaf. Apart from the over-writing style of the author, the whole book is a complete mess. There is an almost pleasure and glee with how the rape and incest scenes are described and although the author has done a lot of research about guns, the overwrought prose and excessive use of violence and rape for shock value (?) or literary praise gave me a feel of deep unease. The grim reality of women and girls living this hell, makes this book particularly distasteful as well as disrespectful of their struggle and suffering. If I could this book would not even get one start.

I've only read the first few chapters and I'm ready to quit. I agree with the other one-star reviewers: it is grossly overwritten. After a while, the endless descriptions of every plant, creature and rock have the opposite effect of what the author was probably trying to achieve. He shoves so much description down our throats that the reader doesn't have enough space to create his or her own mental picture. Its boring, repetitive, excessive and unnecessary. The author is simply trying way, way too hard, which makes him sound like an amateur. And then of course there's the cliched characters, the misogyny, the pornographic rape scenes... it all adds up to a soul-depleting read. Yuck!

This book may want to make you throw up.
A very horrific story line - child abuse, incest, violence.
Likely you will want to finish reading it - hoping fervently that
the ending will provide some relief for the painful beginning and middle.
The setting - omg - the woods will never feel good to you again.
Wild radish may cause you to break out in fear!
Ugh - just did not like this book but read it to the end.
Credit needs to be given to the author for a well written piece of work, a bare style with excruciating details.

This is the hardest review I have had to write this year, mainly because I read too many reviews from other people before even reading the book. People love it, people hate it.. Whatever way on the fence they are, very few are going: "Meh, that was alright like". That in itself is exciting I think, so when I got a chance to read it in return for a review I was not only excited to see what the hype was about, but how I was going to sit on that fence.

To start, I wasn't overly impressed. There was so much description of everything ,that it took me forever to get through a page trying to put pictures to all these words:
The sun has risen a hands breadth above the horizon, crowning the eastern hills, sheaves of light slanting through the stunted trees. The road winds out below her, following a ridge with thickly wooded gulches on either side. She eases along, stopping to watch the silk-burrows of spiders in the cut bank, raking through grass for the grass-colored mantises, turning over roadside stones.
Beautiful huh? but page after page after page.. it gets a bit tedious.

The story (If you somehow have missed hearing about it) follows Turtle, 14, living in a rundown part of a small Californian cost with her mentally, physically and sexually abusive father. The author takes you right in there and there is no escaping the details of the abuse, but somehow he didn't manage to convince me, the way he portrait the abuse felt like I was reading about an abusive relationship between an unrelated woman and a man and not a child/father. I read one review were the person said that if the author really wanted to do something new and had wanted too avoid too sexualize Turtle, he would have written the MC as a boy/son in the same scenario and not a girl.. And I agree.

Turtle meets Jacob and Brett, two boys with the most unrealistic vocabulary imaginable (This didn't bug me) and they become a little gang and have adventures and there are hints towards some light romantic feelings. I read a lot of reviews that didn't like this aspect but I felt it was needed, it gave her character time to grow and change and become stronger.

I really liked the book and the fact that this review was hard to write, that I had to think about how I felt because I wasn't sure.

Tallent's writing attains great beauty when he describes nature, but the plotting in this book left me cold. I so wanted to like Turtle, but she abandoned Cayenne to enormous violence. The gender of the author is clear and not flattering. Women do not describe their own anatomies in the prurient way he uses. I also did not need to know so much about guns and their mechanics. I don't think the images this will leave in your head are worth the read.

This is a very good book. The main characters are truly unique, (even the horrible father) and memorable. This writing will bring the reader an emotional response, that for some will be too dark and visceral. As a reader, if you are looking for sweetness with simple writing you will not find much to like in this book. If, however, you relish full-blooded characters(even if they are evil) , page-turning suspense, a well-crafted plot, and descriptive language that Cormac McCarthy would be proud of, then read this novel. Yes, there are emotionally tough sections that, if you have any morals will make you cringe...not with the writing, but with the characters.
The one thing I did find hard to swallow at first was the inner thought processes of Turtle(the young girl), as they seemed to belong to someone older; but then I realized her circumstanced forced her to either become who she was or she would have succumbed and withered away.
I also felt that Cayenne, an even younger girl brought into the last part of the novel, seemed much older than she was.
The chapters leading up to 'the ultimate confrontation' were gripping. I wanted to rush through to find out what happened but Tallent kept me so engaged I had to stick with it as it evolved.
I'm looking forward to Gabriel Tallents' next book.

My Absolute Darling is a story about 14 year old Julia "Turtle" Alveston who is raised by her unstable and abusive father, Martin. Martin tries to instill in Turtle the belief that she is his "Absolute Darling" - she is made by him, belongs to him and he can do with her what he will. The novel is beautifully written and describes the ambivalence Turtle feels towards her father whom she loves and hates with equal ferocity. The other characters in the book are well depicted and their interactions and relationships with Turtle serve to highlight the aberration of her life with her father. So much happens in this novel, each emotion-filled incident the result of something preceding it and the catalyst for the event to follow. Seldom has a book evoked such diverse, strong emotions in me. At times, it left me horrified and emotionally drained. At other times, I was filled with hope, faith in humanity, and admiration for the strength and determination ultimately shown by Turtle. Thanks to HARPER Collins UK, 4th Estate and NetGalley for the ARC.

My husband warned that some of this book is "tough" (meaning: "disturbing content"), but I picked it up anyway and found it impossible to put down. Brilliant writing, convincing atmosphere and scene-setting (Mendocino coast), and fast-paced, it seems almost MADE for the movie (thriller) that it seems destined to become – except that it's hard to imagine any parents who would allow their child to act in either of the two (out of three) main roles - the 14 year old protagonist, whose horrific father has shaped her life until the story opens, and the 10 year old who enters mid-plot. Using dialogue, interior monologue, and free indirect discourse, this male author tells his psychologically astute story from the point of view of the 14-year old girl. Exploring the ambivalence of love - and hate, this brilliant first novel novel is NOT a downer, though you might fear it will be when you begin. Can't say more without revealing the end.

Much too horrifying and brutal for my taste. Almost couldn't finish it and never liked any of the characters except Anna and Cayenne. The relationship between Turtle and Jacob didn't feel authentic. She spoke to him so horribly....how could he tolerate that and remain her friend? WAY TOO graphic. Makes me sick just thinking about it. Reading should bring you pleasure or improve your knowledge, but this did neither.

This book tells a dark story of child abuse and struggle that is too extreme to understand and ultimately to care about. There are sordid thrills that keep one reading but leave you with a complicit dirtiness. And there is no redeeming payoff in the end. Sorry I finished it.

My thoughts regarding this book are conflicting. I really wanted to like it, and although I almost gave up on it after the first few chapters, I decided to stick with it. The story itself is ok, but the prolific use of profanity on every single page was a big turn-off for me. I understand that the subject matter paved the way for this, but it was just too overdone; probably a third of the book could have been cut by eliminating the multitudinous swear words. Still, Tallent provides an evocative social commentary on generational abuse with a philosophical bent. The characters are deeply flawed, which allows their humanity to shine through, and while the tale is often bleak and stark, there is a whisper of deliverance that bleeds through.

Wow! It's so hard to find the words to describe this haunting, deeply moving book. It is beautifully written and stirs every possible emotion. And that is what also makes it so painful and difficult to read. It tackles some very tough subject matter and in my opinion should not be classified as a young adult book. But perhaps it could be helpful for a troubled teenager to relate to the main character, Turtle and her struggles. I would highly recommend this brilliant book for someone that I know well with the caution that the subject matter is disturbing and it is not going to be for everyone. I definitely understand the mixed reviews, but I predict that it will win many awards. It's a stunning debut by a very talented new writer and his future looks bright!

(4 stars) I can certainly understand the negative reviewers here, and the ones who are placed somewhere squarely in the middle. For those who are unaware, this novel is deeply disturbing, sometimes graphic, and emotionally draining. Personally, I found this book to be quite gripping and memorable. Martin is a villain in a highly real world context; one that I haven't quite come across in works of fiction previously. He's manipulative, controlling, emotionally unstable, and like many people who are psychologically abusive, obsessed with reasoning things through the scope of mythology and seeing the world as a constant dystopia. There's a fascinating progression throughout that shows her slowly building trust in others and herself, and even so much as to outgrow her father. It's subtle and does not smack you over the head with the need to push a story. The end is not absolute in much of anything (except for one), but it felt appropriate; for many abuse victims, there are no clear conclusions or happy endings, simply a continuation of life, albeit through different means. If this debut novel is indicative of what Gabriel Tallent has to offer, then I certainly look forward to his future works.

--The small reasons for this being 4 and not 5 are the way Jacob and Brett communicate (their dialogue is very stilted, and reeks of a writer who doesn't know how teenagers really talk to each other, especially in dire situations). Sometimes, they're entirely oblivious to everything happening around them, but other times they talk like they're 50 year old WASPS. It's very strange.

--This author tends to get wrapped up in prose like it's water and he's dehydrated. Soooooo many adjectives and unnecessary comments on nature. I get the point of why it is there, but there's a lot of fat in it between sections of plot. Take off like 10%.

I don't know how to rate this book. I read it obsessively. It's dark and sad and the things that Turtle endures are just heartbreaking. Some of the dialogue was tiresome and the descriptions of the guns and the cleaning of guns...I just didn't know why there were pages dedicated to all of the details of the guns. I will never forget this story though. Rating and reviewing this book is too hard.

I have had at least 3 nights of not being able to sleep from this disturbing yet beautifully written book. If you want to read a book that is exquisite in it's prose, where you feel as if you are right there in the same location as the protagonist, and you can even smell the life around her (including the unspeakable horror of her father) then read this astonishing book. If you want to be able to sleep and not have this book in your head forever because of the absolutely disgusting sadistic abuse, then do not read this. I got half way through this book and had to put it down because it was too disturbing and it was starting to affect my wellbeing - and I'm not feint of heart. No book is worth the trauma....

I was going to try to get through this disturbing, horrid novel. I read some reviews. Thank you all fellow reviewers. Book is heading back to the library.
Hard subject. Despicable characters. If I read one more word about guns, I might have shot the author myself.....

I have no idea how some of these books get on the "must read" lists. How did this book get to print????

I have mixed feelings about this novel. It is exceedingly brutal, often hard to believe, overwritten at times, but a compelling story and many intriguing characters. Despite all the negatives, I could barely put it down.
As the longtime husband of a woman who suffered sexual abuse from a parent (her mother!), i am familiar with many of the patterns and challenges abused women experience. I thought Tallent's descriptions of the difficulty Turtle had in facing her situation was realistic. I loved the peripheral characters in the Mendocino area. I did not love all the wordiness and stilted language. But the story held my interest. and Turtle is worth rooting for.

My favorite book of 2017. I was not sure that I was going to like this book when I got to the end of the first chapter but I couldn't put it down. The characters and content is gritty and emotionally raw but the characters, especially, Turtle, are so compelling, I had to keep reading. The end was exciting, if not slightly implausible, but the aftermath was incredibly emotional and psychologically accurate. If you like complex characters and character-driven books, this is a must read. Beware that this is not an uplifting book. It is a book about how far we can push ourselves emotionally and mentally.

I can completely understand some of the negative reviews for this book. It is horrifying, as it should be. However, it is a wonderfully written journey of a girl whose abusive experience is unlike the vast, vast majority of those reading about her life. Her thoughts and emotions paint a vivid picture of Julia/Turtle. Her isolation, self-hate/loathing, upside-down thoughts on love, and conflicting emotions lends a deep realness to this book. After the first sexual incident (being discreet as to not spoil anything), I really had to stop and consider if I was going to continue on with the book. In the end, I decided that people have difficult/hurtful/unforgiving experiences in life, and I wasn't going to close my eyes to that. I recognized that this wasn't going to be a fluffy, feel good novel, and moved forward. It is certainly difficult to read about her abuse, but I found the content relevant. It's nothing short of triumphant when she does begin to connect the dots, seeing things as they really are and how they could be. I will be giving this book a second round, at some point.

Un-put-downable. There can be no higher praise. Once I started reading, I was reluctant to stop. Sure, it's a first novel; but this is a supremely gifted writer whose second novel will probably be even better as he continues to grow into his powers (although it's hard to imagine how the next one CAN be better.) Forget comparisons with Scout and Huck Finn - Turtle is nothing like either of the two. She is, instead, a fully realized incarnation of the power of a spirit so determined to survive and retain her humanity that this desire enables her to transcend the most hideous abuses and betrayals a warped and twisted mind - her father's - can devise to crush it out. I've read thousands of books in my lifetime, and I'm generally pretty unflappable, but I was literally rooting for Turtle under my breath when I reached the climactic final chapters of the novel. It is thrilling to find a writer who can keep me this entralled straight through the book, and who never tips his hand or lets me take anything for granted. Bravo, Mr. Tallent - you are well named.

Really interesting story and so well written! I originally bought it on my kindle and after the first chapter returned it..I wasn't interested in reading all the horrifying details of a father raping and controlling his daughter..but then a few days later I found myself wondering what happens to turtle, so I re-bought it..there are definitely tough scenes but the book is not over-saturated by them which was my original concern..very very very good book! Possibly one of my new favorites

I found this book to be too long by half. It was excruciating to read, not because of the brutal physical violence and grim, stupid psychological abuse, but because of the meandering, pointless plot and intricate, plodding, detailed account of EVERYTHING.

I'm surprised the publisher didn't insist that a) the book be shorted by at least 100 pages, and b) that the writing be sharply tightened. Far too many events were presented in this story, so it was misleading /unclear as to where the narrative was going. Further, each and every action, each and every occurrence, no matter how significant or how trivial, was laid out in excessive, precise, tedious detail. The heroine's thoughts, as well as the dialogue, were convoluted and unconvincing.

This book COULD have been good ( if not the masterpiece it's accused of being) if it were shortened and tightened A LOT. I was intrigued with the book at first, then determined to get through it, and now feel like I wasted time on this meandering slog. I've read it, I can't unread it, and I don't feel I learned anything from it.. To redeem the hours I spent slogging it-- I wish I had read 2 other same length books instead.

Not a book for the casual reader . Mr Tallent has a propensity for long descriptive , precise , learned paragraphs . It is somewhat off putting .
I must say that I could have done without the lengthy firearms descriptions as well as the over the top nature elaborations .
However this is really not what the book is about . "Turtle" is the heart of the book and I couldn't let go of her . I had to know how she would survive ,or not , the atrocities heaped upon her . In the end this is work that will resonate with many because of its thruthfulness .

Its a disturbing twisted story, filled with graphic details of a little girl being raped. For some reason the male author writes the little girl as looking forward to and anticipating being raped. The descriptions were seedy and sordid.
The author uses a lot of descriptive words to make up for the fact that there's very little storytelling going on.

There is so much to hate about this book, I truly do not understand all the rave reviews. First of all, the book is about a 14 year old girl written by a man. That alone should tell you something, what the hell does this guy know about being a teenage girl?? The writing seems fetishized to me, something many others have brought up as well. The constant talk of guns and the language described Turtle and the sexual interactions and abuse reek of male fantasy. The dialogue is awful, with characters constantly repeating the same sentences 2, 3 or 4 times in a row. I am not offended in the slightest by curse words, but they were used in the narrative in seemingly unnecessary situations so that too seemed gratuitous. There is no character development whatsoever, and it is impossible to understand the relationships between any of the characters besides Turtle and her grandfather. I basically could not understand why anyone was acting the way they were, their reactions, their interactions with each other, etc. To add insult to injury, there is no true resolution to the book. It randomly ends in the middle of a scene and then that's it. I don't know that I have hated a book this much in a long time.

While I found this book interesting enough to finish, I was disappointed. I am not sure who the author's target audience is. It is about a 14 year old girl known as Turtle/Kibble/Julia, (side note - why does she need three names?) but is far too dark and disturbing for that age. I am in my late twenties, and found the language disgusting. There is also way too much talk of guns, cleaning guns, types of guns, blah blah blah guns, which again makes me wonder who his target audience is.
It became very obvious to me that the author was male due to the language used to refer to and describe female characters, 14 year old girls thoughts are not like this at all. I understand that the girl is treated poorly and raised in an abusive home, but her father never uses the disgusting language that Turtle does in the book. The author also romanticizes/normalizes rape and incest. I'm not sure what the authors intentions were with this book, why is he writing a coming of age story about a young girl? It's certainly not an area he can relate to. I'm not sure why the media is pushing it as an amazing debut for the author. While the writing was detailed it was too wordy and needed a better editor. There were many times I would gloss over paragraphs due to boredom of his overly descriptive writing. The end is unsatisfying and I'm honestly still confused about parts in the book, but don't want to re-read and clarify. I will not be reading anything he publishes in the future.

I bought Gabriel Talent's book, “My Absolute Darling,” at the book signing Gallery Books hosted for him at The Little River Inn in September. Local author writing a book which takes place on our Mendocino coast that received rave reviews from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR? Sounded good to me.

As you know by now the book is about a tough fourteen year old girl who lives in the backwoods between Little River and Albion with her survivalist father who abuses her physically, psychologically, and sexually. Turtle is her own person though, and as fascinating a fictional character as you will meet. I learned a lot from her about the inner voice of the abused child. Reviews by readers here describe the book with great enthusiasm-- “masterpiece,” “brilliant,” “unforgettable”-- and also negatively-- “horrendous,” “repetitive,” “excessive”--and I agreed with almost every review I read.

More than any book I've ever read “My Absolute Darling” has a life of its own. I didn't want to read it in bed at night because I thought it might interfere with my sleep. But then, in order to feel at ease at bedtime, I realized I had to physically remove the book from my bedroom and put it into the hallway when I wasn't reading it. As I read on I could no longer leave it on that upstairs shelf. The book was crackling with too much energy. For awhile I was okay with setting it in the downstairs living room, but then I found myself moving it into the garage where it remained until I finished it. All this unprecedented book-moving was surprising and genuinely amusing to me.

While I was reading it I pondered whether or not I would recommend it to my friends, but I never came to a conclusion. At times I thought it was the very best book I'd ever read and at other times it was just too disturbing, too exhausting. So, would I recommend “My Absolute Darling”? Not necessarily. Am I glad I read it? Absolutely.

I usually give a book 50 pages before moving on if I don't like it . Too many books, too little time. I couldn't make it that far with this one. It makes me wonder about our society that this subject matter treated in this manner could possibly become a best seller. I found it disgusting from the start and it wasn't improving.

The author conveys good knowledge of the north coast of CA and it’s people. He also knows his guns. However, he needed to do more research on the dynamics of child sexual abuse. Instead, he wrote an excessive, shocking, painful novel that quickly became just bad. He seemed to be begging to for his novel become a movie with the ridiculous gun violence that went on and on at the end. Don’t waste your time.

[spoilers ahead]

This book was certainly engrossing and full of rich, horrifying detail. But it was too divorced from reality for me to completely enjoy it.

1. Can we really believe that NOBODY called child protective services to investigate Turtle's situation? Surely one of her high school friends would have called, especially given that they talked about it multiple times.

2. At the end, Turtle is clearly suffering from PTSD. Are we really to believe that Anna would not insist on therapy, given that her young friend is clearly tortured? And Turtle, being open to opportunity as she was at the end, would surely have engaged in therapy.

3. I refuse to believe that Martin's drinking buddy would not have heeded Turtle's call to call the authorities.

I know that these two details are small, but a realistic portrayal of these factors would have changed the plot and ending. This definitely detracted from my enjoyment of the book as a whole.

Stunningly written. Gorgeous, perfect writing with a very complex perspective, and I respect that the author took this on so fearlessly. (The ending was not as strong as far as the story line went... a little over the top. But who cares?)
If you like literature over pulp fiction and dark subject matter delivered with ruthless honesty, this might be for you.
I will read whatever this guy writes next.

A stunner of the highest magnitude. Beautiful prose and a harrowing, engrossing narrative make this book near-impossible to put down. The fact that this is a debut novel makes it even more compelling, knowing Gabriel Tallent will have a long and fruitful career as an author. Turtle is a marvel of literary creation, as real a character as I have ever read. Easily one of the best novels I've read this year. It's brutal and disturbing, but also beautiful and uplifting, one of those stories that sticks with you long after it's over. Highly recommended.

The writing was amazing. It pulled you in and hooked you so whether you wanted to continue to read or not because of the content..you had to. You had to because you fell in love with the main character and wanted to.see her thrive! I felt ambivalent about the content as it was very hard to read about and yet it was so real and honest that part of me felt it needed to be brought to the surface . Yes it was graphic and descriptive and for some hard to read and so for some maybe it's not for them.

“She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she re-encounters the trauma.”

----Judith Lewis Herman

Gabriel Tallent, a Mexican author, has penned an extremely heart wrenching and horrifying, debut young adult contemporary fiction called, My Absolute Darling that centers around a young teenage girl, living with her crack head father, who teaches her about guns and shooting targets in the morning after her school and rapes her almost every other night, although the young protagonist, is clever and brave enough to get out of this terrifying life of hers, yet her emotions don't let her to, but her life drastically changes, when her grandfather dies suspiciously, her father pulls her out of school, where her teachers are worried about her lifestyle, and her father brings home another young girl.

Synopsis:

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. The reader tracks Turtle's escalating acts of physical and emotional courage, and watches, heart in throat, as she struggles to become her own hero--and in the process, becomes ours as well.

Turtle, a 14-year old teenager, lives with her father, Martin, in an American countryside somewhere near the woods, and the condition of the household is very, very grim. After Turtle's mother's death, Martin has been raising up his only daughter all by himself, although occasionally, his father, suspects about the little girl's upbringing in a wrong environment, yet Martin managed in every possible way to provide for her daughter, and that left him lonely, hard-edged and sometimes a crackhead, as he philosophized about climate change, life and guns. Martin is obsessed about guns and he never once fails to inculcate his passion for guns into his daughter's heart, as right after her school, he trained her how to shoot targets and everything about guns, sometimes, helped her in studies in a rather rough way.

There is also a dark side to Turtle's strange and uncanny childhood, and that is, rape, almost every other night, she is raped by her own father. And even though Turtle knows that she can escape it, yet she stayed put, due to the heavy baggage of emotional attachment towards her own father. And that made Turtle very brutish towards her peers. Although life changed in a bad way, when her grandfather dies who always suspected about Martin and Turtle, and her father pulls her out of the school. Even though, she is having fun with her new found friend, Jacob and his clean and normal life style, still Turtle doesn't see any hope as his father brings along another young teenage girl. Can Turtle escape him?

I know, after reading the review, you might end up saying that my review is biased, because of the unnecessary hype with elegant titles like "Most talked debut fiction of 2017" and so on. But trust me, once you read this book, you will understand what the literary world and Stephen King too is positively ranting about this particular book. Yes, I agree, that the story line isn't that original, as its too "been-there-read-that" kind, but the way the author has represented it and especially, twisted the story is such a sadistic yet astounding manner with a thriller playing out subtly on its backdrop, that you will fall for it with all your heart and mind. And thank god, the author has not involved any tried tropes and cliches to pen this moving rape-victim survivor story. Yes its my favorite novel from this year and I'm glad that I got an opportunity to review it.

Firstly the author has portrayed the countryside with woods and rivers so brilliantly and vividly that each and every scene in such a back ground comes alive right before the eyes of the readers. Not only that, the author has arrested the aura of such a wild countryside by depicting its smells to flora to the climate to its people to its roads to everything, that is bound to teleport the readers right in the middle of such a location.

The writing style of the author is fresh, and eloquent, that syncs well with a tightly held and well researched plot, that is laced and layered with deep, dark emotions that will at times move the author or will left them terrified to their very core. The narrative is realistic and often horrifying enough to give a creepy feeling. The sadness, darkness and disgust are what makes the tale so much empowering and enlightening. The pacing is really fast, as I found myself rushing and breezing through the pages of this book, in order to learn about Turtle's fate, that the author has painted in a thoughtful yet unforeseeable manner towards his readers.

Told from the perspective of a 14 year old girl, this appealing voice will imprint into the hearts and souls of the readers. Turtle's portrayal is raw and honest, and her apt voice will resonate with victims who have underwent through the same thing. Her damaged yet brave soul is what will make her an epitome in the eyes of the young readers. Her strive and struggle towards escape and freedom yet dealing with the emotions that hold her back to her father is quite sensitively depicted. Not only that, Martin's character is also very much well developed, in a way that the readers will form a love-hate relationship with him just like Turtle did. Why love-hate? Because of his back story that is painful and the author has put enough justifications to his tormenting nature, how he turned into a vile and dominating monster towards his own daughter, and how his philosophies spoke more about a concerned man. Rest of the supporting cast are also etched in an interesting manner.

In a nutshell, this is a must-read book and once you read it, you will know all about its hype, that it is actually true. So don't dare to miss one of the best debut books of 2017.

I first learned of this book while listening to the author be interviewed on NPR. The book has received plenty of praise and it sounds like a very interesting read. However, I was only able to plough through the first few chapters. My eyes were assaulted with archaic words for women's anatomy that only a man would conjure to refer to women. Descriptions of incest were troubling, and exacerbated by disturbing depictions of the young girll's desire as if it were from the perspective of a grown woman in touch with what it's like to feel desire.

I can only imagine how much more gross and disturbing the tale gets.

I don't know the audience for this book. It's clearly written for people who enjoy reading misogynistic words on every page.

Do not read this book.

My very first thought on the very first page of this novel was about Chekov's gun: "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired." and the corollary: "One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off."

As soon as Turtle started handling those guns and describing their parts with the expertise of a career military person, I knew we were in for one hell of a shootout sooner or later. And when Martin proved to be careless about cleaning his guns and had a few mishaps when shooting them, it was pretty obvious who was going to prevail when the shootout finally happened.

Mr. Tallent's writing skills are obvious. He is stunningly poetic in his descriptions of the flora and fauna of coastal California, and he is quite good with his scene setting and character development. On that score, a little background on how Martin became so pathologically bent would have been useful---beyond the description of Grandpa possibly having committed some war crimes in his youth. Plus I wanted to know more about Turtle's mother and the circumstances of her death (murder? suicide? It wasn't clear to me. Perhaps it was to others). It would have been revelatory. But those scenes of abuse! Each one of them could have been half as long and still have been effective---especially given how well Mr. Tallent writes. It was as if we were dared not to be titillated by them. Which is horrible. Sex is one thing; abuse is monstrous.

Also, given Turtle's thoughtfulness and native intelligence, I really don't think she would have shot that gun at Cayenne as Cayenne held the coin. Nor do I think Cayenne, nine years old and already traumatized, would have sat there holding it. I get that we are being shown the effects of long-term abuse on a child's psyche, but the whole scene didn't ring true. Nor did the "surgery" performed after the shooting. There were a few other such scenes that demanded too much suspension of disbelief.

Another problem: the dialog between the two high school freshmen boys. Has anyone ever heard 14-year-olds so knowledgable about Marcus Aurelius? and able to quote from so many literary classics? and able to maintain such dry senses of humor in such frightening circumstances? I don't think so, entertaining as it was. Plus, as another reviewer herein points out, Turtle herself, who in the early chapters is shown to have such a stunted vocabulary, is able to think some awfully deep, analytical, insightful thoughts, all with the proper technical word usage.

And surely I can't be the only one who doubts the cooking skills and knowledge of food of these three young teenagers.

There were also a number of times and circumstances in which adults would have appeared on the scene. The author seemed to cover for this by indicating how blase the aging hippies and yogis of the community were about children and government bureaucracy, but there's no way Anna wouldn't have looked in on Turtle more often, especially when she didn't turn up for registration. Or that Jacob and Brett's parents wouldn't have been more concerned, especially since Brett's mother (or was it Jacob's?) KNEW Martin.

Two stars or three? The writing is so wonderful and so many of the scenes are such a pleasure to read. The tension is riveting. Even though we know the showdown is coming and who is going to "win," the set up and execution (!) were gripping. This book is sometimes very difficult to read because of the subject matter, but it is easy to recognize Mr. Tallent's talent.

I usually give a book 50 pages before moving on if I don't like it . Too many books, too little time. I couldn't make it that far with this one. It makes me wonder about our society that this subject matter treated in this manner could possibly become a best seller. I found it disgusting from the start and it wasn't improving.

The author conveys good knowledge of the north coast of CA and it’s people. He also knows his guns. However, he needed to do more research on the dynamics of child sexual abuse. Instead, he wrote an excessive, shocking, painful novel that quickly became just bad. He seemed to be begging to for his novel become a movie with the ridiculous gun violence that went on and on at the end. Don’t waste your time.

[spoilers ahead]

This book was certainly engrossing and full of rich, horrifying detail. But it was too divorced from reality for me to completely enjoy it.

1. Can we really believe that NOBODY called child protective services to investigate Turtle's situation? Surely one of her high school friends would have called, especially given that they talked about it multiple times.

2. At the end, Turtle is clearly suffering from PTSD. Are we really to believe that Anna would not insist on therapy, given that her young friend is clearly tortured? And Turtle, being open to opportunity as she was at the end, would surely have engaged in therapy.

3. I refuse to believe that Martin's drinking buddy would not have heeded Turtle's call to call the authorities.

I know that these two details are small, but a realistic portrayal of these factors would have changed the plot and ending. This definitely detracted from my enjoyment of the book as a whole.

Stunningly written. Gorgeous, perfect writing with a very complex perspective, and I respect that the author took this on so fearlessly. (The ending was not as strong as far as the story line went... a little over the top. But who cares?)
If you like literature over pulp fiction and dark subject matter delivered with ruthless honesty, this might be for you.
I will read whatever this guy writes next.

A stunner of the highest magnitude. Beautiful prose and a harrowing, engrossing narrative make this book near-impossible to put down. The fact that this is a debut novel makes it even more compelling, knowing Gabriel Tallent will have a long and fruitful career as an author. Turtle is a marvel of literary creation, as real a character as I have ever read. Easily one of the best novels I've read this year. It's brutal and disturbing, but also beautiful and uplifting, one of those stories that sticks with you long after it's over. Highly recommended.

The writing was amazing. It pulled you in and hooked you so whether you wanted to continue to read or not because of the content..you had to. You had to because you fell in love with the main character and wanted to.see her thrive! I felt ambivalent about the content as it was very hard to read about and yet it was so real and honest that part of me felt it needed to be brought to the surface . Yes it was graphic and descriptive and for some hard to read and so for some maybe it's not for them.

“She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she re-encounters the trauma.”

----Judith Lewis Herman

Gabriel Tallent, a Mexican author, has penned an extremely heart wrenching and horrifying, debut young adult contemporary fiction called, My Absolute Darling that centers around a young teenage girl, living with her crack head father, who teaches her about guns and shooting targets in the morning after her school and rapes her almost every other night, although the young protagonist, is clever and brave enough to get out of this terrifying life of hers, yet her emotions don't let her to, but her life drastically changes, when her grandfather dies suspiciously, her father pulls her out of school, where her teachers are worried about her lifestyle, and her father brings home another young girl.

Synopsis:

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. The reader tracks Turtle's escalating acts of physical and emotional courage, and watches, heart in throat, as she struggles to become her own hero--and in the process, becomes ours as well.

Turtle, a 14-year old teenager, lives with her father, Martin, in an American countryside somewhere near the woods, and the condition of the household is very, very grim. After Turtle's mother's death, Martin has been raising up his only daughter all by himself, although occasionally, his father, suspects about the little girl's upbringing in a wrong environment, yet Martin managed in every possible way to provide for her daughter, and that left him lonely, hard-edged and sometimes a crackhead, as he philosophized about climate change, life and guns. Martin is obsessed about guns and he never once fails to inculcate his passion for guns into his daughter's heart, as right after her school, he trained her how to shoot targets and everything about guns, sometimes, helped her in studies in a rather rough way.

There is also a dark side to Turtle's strange and uncanny childhood, and that is, rape, almost every other night, she is raped by her own father. And even though Turtle knows that she can escape it, yet she stayed put, due to the heavy baggage of emotional attachment towards her own father. And that made Turtle very brutish towards her peers. Although life changed in a bad way, when her grandfather dies who always suspected about Martin and Turtle, and her father pulls her out of the school. Even though, she is having fun with her new found friend, Jacob and his clean and normal life style, still Turtle doesn't see any hope as his father brings along another young teenage girl. Can Turtle escape him?

I know, after reading the review, you might end up saying that my review is biased, because of the unnecessary hype with elegant titles like "Most talked debut fiction of 2017" and so on. But trust me, once you read this book, you will understand what the literary world and Stephen King too is positively ranting about this particular book. Yes, I agree, that the story line isn't that original, as its too "been-there-read-that" kind, but the way the author has represented it and especially, twisted the story is such a sadistic yet astounding manner with a thriller playing out subtly on its backdrop, that you will fall for it with all your heart and mind. And thank god, the author has not involved any tried tropes and cliches to pen this moving rape-victim survivor story. Yes its my favorite novel from this year and I'm glad that I got an opportunity to review it.

Firstly the author has portrayed the countryside with woods and rivers so brilliantly and vividly that each and every scene in such a back ground comes alive right before the eyes of the readers. Not only that, the author has arrested the aura of such a wild countryside by depicting its smells to flora to the climate to its people to its roads to everything, that is bound to teleport the readers right in the middle of such a location.

The writing style of the author is fresh, and eloquent, that syncs well with a tightly held and well researched plot, that is laced and layered with deep, dark emotions that will at times move the author or will left them terrified to their very core. The narrative is realistic and often horrifying enough to give a creepy feeling. The sadness, darkness and disgust are what makes the tale so much empowering and enlightening. The pacing is really fast, as I found myself rushing and breezing through the pages of this book, in order to learn about Turtle's fate, that the author has painted in a thoughtful yet unforeseeable manner towards his readers.

Told from the perspective of a 14 year old girl, this appealing voice will imprint into the hearts and souls of the readers. Turtle's portrayal is raw and honest, and her apt voice will resonate with victims who have underwent through the same thing. Her damaged yet brave soul is what will make her an epitome in the eyes of the young readers. Her strive and struggle towards escape and freedom yet dealing with the emotions that hold her back to her father is quite sensitively depicted. Not only that, Martin's character is also very much well developed, in a way that the readers will form a love-hate relationship with him just like Turtle did. Why love-hate? Because of his back story that is painful and the author has put enough justifications to his tormenting nature, how he turned into a vile and dominating monster towards his own daughter, and how his philosophies spoke more about a concerned man. Rest of the supporting cast are also etched in an interesting manner.

In a nutshell, this is a must-read book and once you read it, you will know all about its hype, that it is actually true. So don't dare to miss one of the best debut books of 2017.

I first learned of this book while listening to the author be interviewed on NPR. The book has received plenty of praise and it sounds like a very interesting read. However, I was only able to plough through the first few chapters. My eyes were assaulted with archaic words for women's anatomy that only a man would conjure to refer to women. Descriptions of incest were troubling, and exacerbated by disturbing depictions of the young girll's desire as if it were from the perspective of a grown woman in touch with what it's like to feel desire.

I can only imagine how much more gross and disturbing the tale gets.

I don't know the audience for this book. It's clearly written for people who enjoy reading misogynistic words on every page.

Do not read this book.

My very first thought on the very first page of this novel was about Chekov's gun: "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired." and the corollary: "One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off."

As soon as Turtle started handling those guns and describing their parts with the expertise of a career military person, I knew we were in for one hell of a shootout sooner or later. And when Martin proved to be careless about cleaning his guns and had a few mishaps when shooting them, it was pretty obvious who was going to prevail when the shootout finally happened.

Mr. Tallent's writing skills are obvious. He is stunningly poetic in his descriptions of the flora and fauna of coastal California, and he is quite good with his scene setting and character development. On that score, a little background on how Martin became so pathologically bent would have been useful---beyond the description of Grandpa possibly having committed some war crimes in his youth. Plus I wanted to know more about Turtle's mother and the circumstances of her death (murder? suicide? It wasn't clear to me. Perhaps it was to others). It would have been revelatory. But those scenes of abuse! Each one of them could have been half as long and still have been effective---especially given how well Mr. Tallent writes. It was as if we were dared not to be titillated by them. Which is horrible. Sex is one thing; abuse is monstrous.

Also, given Turtle's thoughtfulness and native intelligence, I really don't think she would have shot that gun at Cayenne as Cayenne held the coin. Nor do I think Cayenne, nine years old and already traumatized, would have sat there holding it. I get that we are being shown the effects of long-term abuse on a child's psyche, but the whole scene didn't ring true. Nor did the "surgery" performed after the shooting. There were a few other such scenes that demanded too much suspension of disbelief.

Another problem: the dialog between the two high school freshmen boys. Has anyone ever heard 14-year-olds so knowledgable about Marcus Aurelius? and able to quote from so many literary classics? and able to maintain such dry senses of humor in such frightening circumstances? I don't think so, entertaining as it was. Plus, as another reviewer herein points out, Turtle herself, who in the early chapters is shown to have such a stunted vocabulary, is able to think some awfully deep, analytical, insightful thoughts, all with the proper technical word usage.

And surely I can't be the only one who doubts the cooking skills and knowledge of food of these three young teenagers.

There were also a number of times and circumstances in which adults would have appeared on the scene. The author seemed to cover for this by indicating how blase the aging hippies and yogis of the community were about children and government bureaucracy, but there's no way Anna wouldn't have looked in on Turtle more often, especially when she didn't turn up for registration. Or that Jacob and Brett's parents wouldn't have been more concerned, especially since Brett's mother (or was it Jacob's?) KNEW Martin.

Two stars or three? The writing is so wonderful and so many of the scenes are such a pleasure to read. The tension is riveting. Even though we know the showdown is coming and who is going to "win," the set up and execution (!) were gripping. This book is sometimes very difficult to read because of the subject matter, but it is easy to recognize Mr. Tallent's talent.

Absolutely sick. Tallent is an extremely gifted writer, but also has an extremely warped view of life. He's a prime candidate for suicide sometime in the next decade if he keeps this up. Here's hoping he finds peace in this life before it's too late. Maybe he could do something completely counter-intuitive to his vocab-heavy, philosophically-environmentally-sexually disturbingly convoluted world view: find Jesus.

*I won this book from a giveaway and want to give a huge shoutout to Riverhead Books and Goodreads. All opinions are my own.

All the stars and all the praise for MY ABSOLUTE DARLING! I dove into this book with little knowledge of what it’s about and a lot of hype. And the buildup delivered! Tallent spent eight years honing this book and it’s so brazenly obvious in the carefully crafted characters, the gently progressive plot, the superb narrative and the captivating writing style – “…and how you make a fire by staring balefully down into the reflective bottom of an aluminum can until your immense force of will was concentrated and magnified by the parabolic mirror into a white-hot spark of pure Turtle rage that could light anything on fire, even the hearts of unwary high schoolers.”

Set in a small town along the northern coast of California, Turtle Alveston is a broken fourteen year old girl who is battered, abused and seemingly doesn’t stand a chance under the rearing of her misogynistic, controlling, sociopathic father. She’s feral, a loner and failure at school but she’s a survivor – a sharpshooter, hunter and wanderer. My first reaction to Turtle is to hug her and tell her everything will be okay and to let her be a kid.

Turtle gets a taste of freedom and meets two teenaged boys, Jacob and Brett who grow up with the creature comforts she’s gone without. From getting lost in the woods to narrowly escaping being washed away at sea and surviving on an island these kids have a bond. This is the turning point in the story where Turtle questions Martin’s so-called professed love for her and his obsession to have her for himself. She must choose between her freedom or the complicated and familiar life with her father. The decision Turtle makes is gripping and a testament of her strength both physically and emotionally and will make you love her even more, if that’s possible, but something no teenager should ever have to suffer.

This is not an easy story to take in. You can expect complex and disturbing themes that are not easily understood. At over 400 pages MY ABSOLUTE DARLING commands your full attention, it is not a fast page-turner. If you can get thru the tough stuff you will be rewarded with a beautiful work of literary fiction. As a debut novel Tallent proves he has a gift. Turtle’s story will stay with me for a long time. I highly recommend this book!

The troubling story of a young girl (Turtle) who is dominated by her father in every way. I mean EVERY way. Her father has taught her survival skills and she is very capable with guns and getting by on her own. She starts to make friends away from home and her dad gets very jealous, So the primary story is about her attempt to break away from her father's influence. She has a deep seated guilt about her desire to be free of him. Not for everyone but I liked it.

If the self-congratulating overuse of big words wasn’t enough (seriously, how many times did Mr. Tallent consult a thesaurus while writing this book?), then the erotic approach to incest certainly was. The author’s urgent 1st sentence bio mention that he was “raised by two mothers” is beyond contrived - more cringeworthy, actually - in the face of this disturbing fantasy approach to horrific treatment of young women. I bought this book in the airport and wish it had come with a warning.

I bought this book sort of on impulse after reading Stephen King's review. I am a King fan, though I read all genres, and his review was so amazing, I bought it without reading other reviews. And I am glad I did as I don't know that I would have bought it if I knew the subject matter. I should mention that I bought the audible version and listened to it over a couple of weeks commuting to work (excellent narrator). At first, I wasn't sure I would get through it but I kept at it and the more I read, the more I was hooked. It certainly is disturbing but I came to care deeply for Turtle and also for Jacob and Brett. And the story is gripping right to the end. Speaking of the end - it did leave me wanting more. Readers are left wondering a bit about Turtle's future. Not a novel that leaves things neatly tied up but definitely one that leaves you thinking.

If I could give this a minus --I would! Horrific details of child abuse and incest--read about 80 pages and didn't find any
redeeming value! Didn't want to put more disgusting images in my mind! What were these reviewers thinking?

Flowery words do not make a good novel! Incest even worse. Sure it happens,more than we care to think about,but reading about it I find not entertaining and I do love movies and read books for entertainment and watch docs and read nonfiction for knowledge. Crazy,end of the world nuts are written about too much these days,I'll pass.

Gabriel has the absolute worst ear for teenage dialogue, so much so that it ruined parts of the book. His teenagers, especially the boys Turtle pals around with, have such an erudite vocabulary and understanding of literature, that it was plainly obvious that Talent was speaking through them.

The other issue is that Turtle becomes super-human. She represents something or she's a metaphor - it still ruined the book.

I wouldn't bother with this one.

Beware reader! This is a book that addresses a really horrifying topic. Physical, psychological and sexual abuse from a father to his daughter. It is absolutely crude and so unpleasant to read that I found it almost impossible to read at times. I considered several times if it made sense to read something that is so painful, disgusting and with lots of unnecessary detail and violence, but I decided to continue until the end to try and understand what the author was aiming at. Not worth it. Now I need to find another book that helps me get rid of the shock this novel has left me in.

A week after I finished it and I'm sitting here when I should be doing something else, wondering how to add anything meaningful to the five star reviews here. It's a rough ride, but don't pass this masterpiece by. More than a novel: an experience of the like that few works of fiction can offer.

Wow!!!!
What great writing! I was captivated all the way through.... At times I had to go back and re read a few paragraphs, not being able to believe what I was reading! Terrific insight into the struggle of a young girl dependent on her brutally abusive father. She is torn between love and hate, dependence and fending for herself. Such a gripping story that will tear at your heart and challenge your moral compass.

Though I found the writing good and the story initially interesting, the level of detail in the violence seemed unnecessary to the story telling and also made the book "unbelievable" in a bad way. I wanted to know how the story ended because I cared about the young girl but it was very hard to continue to read this book.

I rarely write reviews but felt I needed to warn readers about this book. I bought it in the airport when my flight was delayed a few hours. The blurb on the back caught my attention and it sounded like a good read. It didn’t take long to reach the first incest scene between father and daughter. It was revolting. I put the book down and left it there-nearly threw it in the garbage. I don’t know how a person can write this stuff. Beyond disturbing.

When the author was in Turtle's mind, I found the writing exceptional. But the descriptive scenes with the boys seemed mundane; and when it came to the final chapter, the story and the writing crashed. However, the good parts are really good, and make the book memorable and worth reading.

I really loved this book, as disturbing as the content was. I thought Tallent did a fantastic job of building up a character from the ground up in such a personal and closely-told way that I saw how an extremist can come into being. I also really appreciated the rich descriptions of California, the wildlife and scenery. I will recommend this.

It's obvious why readers are so polarized on this book. This book is about physical, emotional and sexual abuse of a fourteen-year-old girl by her father. It's not an easy read and many will be turned off by it - we all should be turned off by it!

Turtle Alveston is a fourteen-year-old girl living with her survivalist father in Northern California (her Mother is Dead). She knows the land and has no problem going out into the forest exploring on her own and is quite handy with a gun. She can survive off the land, but can she survive within her father's home? A home in which each morning, before leaving for school, she throws her father a beer and let’s not forget in the beginning of the book we learn he puts their dishes out to be licked clean by raccoons before running a little water on them to be used again.

At school Turtle is isolated and withdrawn. She is quiet and lacks friends. She struggles with her studies and although she will be passed on to high school it is evident that she is far behind her peers. Turtle has low self-esteem and self-loathing.

Martin, her father, is a rough man. He refers to Turtle as his "absolute darling" and is systematically physically, emotionally and sexually abusive to her. He is a man of great depravity and it is alarming that no one seems to suspect anything wrong is going on in that house.

As Turtle ventures out into the world, she is introduced to many people and begins to see a very different type of life far opposite than the life she has with her misogynist controlling abusive father. With hopes of a better life, will she have the strength and courage to break free and finally be able to live her own life?

One complaint about this book is that some of the scenes to me feels as if they were put in there for the shock value. Abuse in all forms is graphic, shocking and horrific but some of the scenes in the book felt, I don't quite know how to put my finger on it, but something about how it was presented felt off. Books such as "The Roanoke Girls" or "The Marsh King's Daughter" came to mind while reading this book. I feel that those two books were able to pull off what this book could not - a more believable viewpoint on survival-ism (The Marsh King's Daughter) and sick twisted relationships with molestation (The Roanoke girls)

No matter what you think of this book, it has people talking, and I believe that was the Author's intention. When a book causes you to think of other books while reading it; well that can be a good thing or a bad thing. In this case, I thought of books that handled the subject matter better.

This is one of the best books I have read so far this year. The writing was beautiful and a stark contrast to the dark subject matter. It took me about 45 pages to really get into the story, but once I did I could not stop reading it. This story will stay with you for a while and really makes you think and reflect. I highly recommend this, however, it is not for the faint of heart . It deals with very dark and taboo topics. I know people have scored this down because of the subject matter, but I would not. I feel like the author did an incredible job with this novel and I look forward to reading whatever he puts out next.

This was a novel I couldn't stop reading. The descriptions are vivid and unusual. Stephen King compares it to "The Night of the Hunter" and parts of it are terrifying. Unless you have serious heart trouble, you should be able to read it - just get comfortable - and leave the lights on - (or turn them off to really get into it).

I can understand readers being turned off because of the graphic descriptions of abuse the protagonist, Turtle, endures at the hands of her father. However, I cannot understand how people can claim this book is not well written. It is beautiful- heart-wrenchingly sad at times, but beautiful. I finished it two days ago and have not been able to stop thinking about it. I'm sure it will continue to haunt me for a long time.

This is a disgusting, ridiculously overwritten book and breaks more than stretches the bounds of credulity. How is it that evil men like child-molester Martin get to breathe the same air as the rest of us? This deranged, depraved, sadistic, misogynistic, soulless, sicko is the father of 14 year old Turtle, the unwitting victim also known as Kibble, Sweet Pea and Julia. She, unfortunately, is as much of a sociopath as her father. She is hard, cold, unfriendly and more than a bit stupid except when it comes to guns. Guns are the real protagonist of this drivel and my wish was for Turtle to blow Martin away spectacularly! Evil men, deserve evil ends.

Despite showing us that Turtle is not in the top percentile of her class, Tallent has her thinking in complex concepts and language beyond her years. The two teenage boys featured in the story, Brett and Jacob, bear zero resemblance to any kid that age I have ever interacted with and their dialogue is way too pretentious. They are completely oblivious to any of the nuances of this feral girl they meet up with in the woods and may well go on to be the same twisted monster as Martin.

The 5 star reviews and high praise of this "book" defy logic. I trust that Mr. Tallent has moved on to writing grocery list or has irreparably damaged his writing hand and is not even considering writing any similar "books". This dark, unflinchingly brutal prose, leaves me mystified. The characters are unreal, the dialogue stupid, the adults brain-dead and the in-your-face gratuitous incest over-done.
I wonder where Mr."Tallent" got the inspiration to write a book such as this. He must have a very low opinion of women and females in general.
There are some books you wait a lifetime to read, this is not such a book!

I am SO sorry I did not read the reviews before borrowing this book for my Kindle. After Turtle didn't put a bullet between her father's eyes (or more appropriately, his legs), after the first two abuse scenes, I skimmed through until the end. Little or no redeeming value here. I am with the other "one star" reviewer who said "I wish I could unread this".

Some of the parts of the book are really hard to get through emotionally. The things the main character had to endure...but it’s a good book. A book I think that will stick in my head for a long time.

This books seems to come with a flurry of mixed reviews. It is a dark plot with gut wrenching details about abuse and a mental state of mind that is hard for most people to relate to. While there is, perhaps, a surplus of details around the California foliage and scenery that can be distracting, I found the book to be a beautiful take on a very dark subject. Tallent's ability to describe a scene and relay the thoughts of an abused 14 year old girl were overwhelming and made me feel as if I knew these people and this place. The writing is a bit verbose and the subject is extremely dark but it is one of the most beautiful and thought provoking books I have read in awhile.

This book was beautifully written, gripping and shocking. I have to say I did not read reviews prior to picking up this book - I only knew it was highly regarded. I was not prepared for the level and quantity of abuse depicted in this book. The first third of the book left me in a bad mood and tears almost every time I put it down. However, I came around and found that I could not put this book down; I so desperately wanted to make sure the main character was going to be ok. I recommend this book to those that know what they are getting into. This book can be graphic and upsetting, but the message and storyline are redeeming and worthwhile.

There is a price you pay when reading a book that unsettles you but if the writing is brilliant or the story justifies the content, the payoff is a reading experience that stays with you for a long time.

I don’t mind when an author pushes the boundaries of comfort, to provoke a reader or to create a story that is disturbing on multiple levels.

A Little Life was an excruciating book to read but the payoff made it worth it. That book has left a mark on my heart forever. Another controversial book that created a huge amount of polarised opinion was All the Ugly and Wonderful Things but I thought the execution of the story was done masterfully.

In the case of My Absolute Darling the payoff was definitely not worth the price of reading it.

The book started off really strong creating an almost tangible tense atmosphere. It felt like a pressure cooker that is going to blow at any second. I was very impressed with the writing and was happy to continue reading even if some of the scenes were quite disturbing.

And then we meet Brett and Jacob…… It has to be some of the most inauthentic dialogue between teenage boys I have read in a long time. The fact that the story also took on a survivalist flavour took me away from the spell I was under in the first 1/3. It was like waking up after an intense dream and I could never go back to that initial feeling. The characters became overly harsh, the scenes that are written to make you feel uncomfortable did just that, but it no longer had redeeming qualities for me. It started feeling gratuitous and unnecessary.

It almost feels as if the author tried to do too much with the story in stead of knowing beforehand what he actually wanted to bring across. I started skim reading after the 50% mark to just get it done.

So although most negative reviews focus on the distaste and crudeness of the father daughter incest I had other problems with the story that prevents me from rating this any higher.

My Absolute Darling is ultimately a novel about survival. Raised by an abusive father who believes the end of the world is imminent, 14-year-old Turtle Alveston leads a secluded, harrowing existence in Northern California. When she meets a charismatic boy named Jacob, she can finally envision a different life for herself, but she is torn between her familiar hell and the terrifying unknown.

I picked up this book after reading so many of its amazing reviews, and I can definitely understand some of the hype. Gabriel Tallent has a gift for describing the natural world; the passages where he writes about the wild, grimly beautiful Mendocino coast are breathtaking and by far my favorite part of the novel.

“Water eddies off the walls and drips, echoing, from the vaulted ceiling. It is waist-deep, the color of old glass. The mouth of the blowhole is open above them and garlands of nasturtiums hang through it, the flowers a burnt red. The floor is carpeted with brown feathers of kelp, and huge orange starfish cling everywhere to the rock.”

But I was unpleasantly surprised by several other aspects of the novel. I found the witty banter between Jacob and his friend Brett completely unbelievable–I don’t know any ninth-grade boys who reference the intricacies of Zen Buddhism in casual conversation, and that’s only one example among many.

While I respect Tallent’s willingness to tackle dark, taboo subject matter, there were several points in the novel where graphic descriptions of violence felt gratuitous. And, in general, there were portions of the novel that seemed bloated.

There are only so many times I need to see Turtle crack a raw egg into her mouth and toss her father a beer. I understand the intent was to establish routine, to set up the father-daughter dynamic, but it began to feel unnecessarily repetitive.

Additionally, I was not a fan of the lengthy, technically detailed passages describing Turtle’s guns. I was not at all familiar with these technical terms, so it was often hard to visualize what Tallent was saying.

True to the reviews I’d read (and the inside of the book jacket), Turtle does emerge victorious in the end. Her shocking, heroic actions in the book’s final chapters are well-paced and action-packed, making for a thrilling read. But then the rest of the ending feels hurried and unfinished. I understand the desire to leave it open-ended to an extent, but I still needed more, especially in regard to the relationship between Turtle and Jacob.

If you’re intrigued by the reviews like I was, you may still want to give this book a chance. Just know that many of these pages are gruesome and excruciating to read–by the end, you’ll understand why it was Stephen King who proclaimed it a “masterpiece.”

As an avid reader of literary fiction, I had read many positive reviews of My Absolute Darling and was therefore stunned by just how much I HATED this ugly, pretentious book. Never have I read a more graphic book about child rape, torture, and incest. Although the author states on the book jacket that he was raised by two moms in Mendocino, he writes with the mind of a misogynist sociopath. The level of depravity was beyond the pale and there was, for me, no redemption at the end. The level of pretention is high, as well. Tallent mentions many elevated literary works and classics—but why? His protagonist has a learning disability and hates school and her father is a survivalist sadist. The friends that the protagonist makes are freshman that talk with a level of intellectual sophistication that I have never heard from 14-year olds. Just more pretension. This was truly the ugliest book I have ever read and it’s incessant, graphic sexual assault read like torture porn. I will never understand those that rated this book highly. Please don’t waste your money.

OMG! This is incredible and amazing! I wish I could give this book ten stars! I am in awe of the incredible talent it took to write this book. This is the best book I have read all year and I don't think I will ever forget it. I didn't want it to end. This is a must read!

While the story about abuse and survival was interesting, the way in which it was portrayed left me a little bothered.

Tallent wrote many of the abusive scenes in an almost romantic, whimsical way that left me more disturbed about the author than about the characters in the book itself. I'm not sure if it would have had the same effect if it had been written by a female, but describing the milky white thighs of a middle-school girl made my skin crawl. Turtle, the 14-year-old, is supposed to be the main character, but she really did seem to be the object - not the subject - throughout.

What a book! A wide, meaty fist of a book, holding tight to the stinging nettle. Beautifully evocative of and hyperlocal in its setting (about 20 miles of NorCal coast between Ten Mile Creek and Albion) and narrow in characters, it plumbs such complexities and pain of love and family. No one else I can name writes quite like this, and it was as riveting as it is disturbing. Hard to believe this is a debut, I’ll be waiting in line for Mr. Tallent’s next effort.

The language is beautiful, but also.. holy description. If you cut one purely descriptive sentence from each paragraph, you could shave 50+ pages off this book. Tallent is clearly well acquainted with the nature he describes, and in some parts the sense of place is strong, but it mostly seems decorative and unnecessary.

Turtle is an interesting character but not an entirely believable one, and the narrative pacing here works well enough that I kept reading but it feels a bit like several smaller narratives strung together. Overall I liked this, but not to the degree of the hype.

This is a tough one. Not for the faint of heart. Very mature themes. Very well written and then imagery is amazing. I was surprised at the end to see it was a male writer because he wrote the female character so well

This is a shockingly misogynistic book. The violent acts against the protagonist are rendered in tender, lingering detail; the author’s female perspective is neither convincing or okay. The writing is overwrought, which could be forgiven in a first novel if the material wasn’t so wrong.

I found the author's descriptive writing remarkable. Where did he get these ideas? The subject matter of incest and abuse was disturbing. If you are able to get past the first chapter then don't give up. You will be rewarded with an unusual experience that is hard to find in a novel from a new author. Two thumbs up!

This book had me excited about reading in a way that I hadn't been for a long time. Beautifully describes northern California landscape and also handles a very dark and challenging subject matter with an expert balance of grit and grace. It was one of those books I hated to finish because it will probably be a while before I find another novel of this quality. Be warned it's not for the faint of heart. Could be triggering or possibly therapeutic for survivors of trauma.

I found this a very engrossing book. A page turner that was very real to me. I don't know how much of this was factual but I believe there are relationships like this in life and it is very complex.

This story was not aimed at my demographic. Had to put it down but not before I had read 80% of it. It is a mean and mean-spirited book. I read the acknowledgements at the end and am convinced that this book was written by committee and a little in sadistic jest.

This book kept showing up in my recommendations list, so I thought I would find out why. I generally enjoy reading literary fiction, books that contain strong female protagonists, and novels that are set in the American West. While this novel fits all three of these descriptors, it is not one that I enjoyed. First of all, the scenes were so incredibly graphic and disturbing that I could hardly keep reading. I kept waiting for some kind of redemption, some kind of resolution, or at least some justification for the graphic violence and descriptions. It never happened, in my opinion. The only redeeming parts of this book are the incredible descriptions of the Northern California landscape. The plot, however, is just too much for me. Reader beware.

I loved this book for its level of detail about everything: the scenery and plants of the Mendocino coast setting, the physical appearance of the characters, the conversations, even the guns. I didn't like the level of violence and sexual abuse. The book didn't need it to make its point -- and some subtlety would have made it a more interesting read.

I’m surprised by the negative reviews. This book was immensely enjoyable - not because it was a feel-good story, but because the characters were rich, the setting received extremely thoughtful attention, and the writing was really great. I couldn’t stop thinking of the book while I read it, and I can’t wait for another book from this author.

I was snagged by a review on NPR.

The dialogue is atrocious. The main character has social awkwardness, which I get, but there is no good dialogue anywhere in the book.

There's not a single decent male character in the entire book. The list of men who fail turtle are as follows:

Spoiler alert

Her dad
Her Grandpa
Her principal
Her two inept friends

Ultimately it's the strong single woman who saves her.

This all dampens this novel's fire. Be ready for pages and pages of detail on the natural environment, and Turtle's incestuous rape and abuse.

Save your time.

I loved this book. The story was very sad, but very real, giving so much insight into family sexual abuse. Turtle is an unforgettable character - so strong, capable and smart, yet plagued by her negative self-image. The description of Turtle's world, the harsh wilderness and ocean is mesmerizing. The ending seemed inevitable, but that didn't lessen the story, one of courage and perseverance in the face of fear and an impossible family life.

It's true that this novel is not for the faint of heart, but true, gritty accounts of sexual abuse shouldn't be. It's a story of feminism and the way we downplay the abuse of women and environmentalism and the way we downplay the abuse of the earth. The writing is unbelievable and the story is heartbreaking and unforgettable. I can't wait to see what else comes out of the mind of this author.

Unforgettable. This book grabs you up and won't let go, even as you know what horror is coming you cannot look away. Turtle stole my heart, she is simply a wonderful character, and Martin- my God what a terrible, believable monstrous human being.
The prose is stunning, the surrounding landscape of Mendicino is a character in its own right, and as soon as I finished the book I wanted to read it again.
The only complaint I have about this novel is that the ending could be considered slightly contrived, but I didn't care, I just loved Turtle so much.
This is a story I will never forget, my favorite book of this year hands down.

This not a work of realism. The author, though gifted, has a young man's tendency to hype everything -- characters and scenery alike.

The highlight of the book for me is the prose he uses to depict Turtle's own consciousness: often intricate, and unlike much else in the book, most of it rings true.

Worth reading, but don't go in expecting a masterpiece. It's a talented young author's ambitious and messy first try. (I wish he had more of hard-nosed editor.)

Good plot except if better edited could have been 1/3 the length. Way too much descriptive wording. At first, I was enjoying it, but after while it was annoying; like reading a thesaurus: After 2/3 of the way through, I had to push myself to finish. No pun intended but Tallent doesn’t show talent as a writer just by over littering a book with adjectives. And how many times was “Christ” repeated? I am really very surprised that this book got the NYTimes and so many other great reviews. I trudged o through and was greatly disappointed that I did. My thoughts on the ending- editor said the book was too long and “that” was the solution. Awful.

This book is disturbing on so many levels. They should put warnings in the book description that it contains incestuous content and fairly graphic family violence, so victims of such do not stumble upon books containing this subject matter unwittingly. The language the father and daughter used to speak to each other was shocking to me. (Do families really speak like this? Or was it just to show hos disturbed and dysfunctional they were?) Having said that, I could not put the book down, much like watching a train wreck, you had to know it turned out okay-ish. While the book was well written, sometimes I felt that I missed something even though I had not. Strange book.

I saw someone on Twitter say they might "die from loving this novel" and now I know what they mean. Never has a novel been so captivating that I resented having to put it down. Prepare yourself for an incredible page-turner, with a ferocious heroine Turtle who you will care about and be rooting for and half-covering your eyes as you read on to see how she will make it out of jaw-droppingly horrific situations. She has the feel of an instant classic character who will live in your heart forever. Highly recommended.

Not getting the rave reviews of this book. Sad is ok; sordid is not. So many words, but we never really meet Turtle. I did skim to see what happened. In the end, it was predictable and not at all satisfying. All this said, Tallent will write other books that are better. He’s got the goods.

I absolutely loved it, and couldn’t put it down. One the one hand, this is a difficult read, as human nature proves it can be vile. But fortunately, human nature shows its lovely side, as well. The added bonus is the northern coastal California setting. Take a deep breath and try this!

This book was beyond disturbing and sickening. The incest, violence and vulgarity was obviously not taken into consideration when the cover lists it as a NYT Bestseller, or as one of the "best books in this era." As much as I was looking forward to this, I will not be recommending it to any one. It's just a jungle of never-ending adjectives, vulgar descriptors and, what I believe: ill-written novel.