My Absolute Darling

A Novel

De: Gabriel Tallent

Narrado por: Alex McKenna

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE AND THE JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND USA TODAY

"Impossible to put down." —NPR

"A novel that readers will gulp down, gasping.” —The Washington Post

"The word 'masterpiece' has been cheapened by too many blurbs, but My Absolute Darling absolutely is one." —Stephen King

From the author of the acclaimed novel Crux, a brilliant, immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.

Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of her mother, in the thrall of her tortured and charismatic father, Martin. Her social existence is confined to the middle school (where she fends off the interest of anyone, student or teacher, who might penetrate her shell) and to her life with her father.

Then Turtle meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes, lives in a big clean house, and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first time, the larger world begins to come into focus: her life with Martin is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape, using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching her. What follows is a harrowing story of bravery and redemption. With Turtle's escalating acts of physical and emotional courage, the reader watches, heart in throat, as this teenage girl struggles to become her own hero—and in the process, becomes ours as well.

Shot through with striking language in a fierce natural setting, My Absolute Darling is an urgently told, profoundly moving read that marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer.

Too much.

This man can write! That said, he needed a stricter editor. There are several set pieces too many, and the disappearance of “Daddy” and reappearance with a 10-year-old girl is a clear plot device to both give Turtle a chance to see what a normal life might be like and to give her a victim to protect and thus permission to finally kill dear old dad. The last scenes of rape and torture and the bloody battle at Jacob’s home - no parents in sight for a large group of 15-year-olds - were too, too much. Despite the great writing and the wonderful narration, I wish I’d never bought this book.

Tallent Has Talent

Would like to give My Absolute Darling 41/2 Stars, will go with 5. Gabriel Tallent writes beautifully about the wonderful and awful things his many named character, Julia/Turtle/Kibble, lives through as a teenager on her veteran alcoholic grandfather's rundown yet substantial coastal property on the Medicino Coast bordered by National Parks with her isolated, enraged, firearms-devotee, carpenter, eco-fatalist widowed father, Martin. Tallent takes us digging in the dirt, fishing for ells under coastal rocks, foraging/hunting/cooking dinner and stealthily following two teenage boys who lost their way in the Medicino woods. And thru his strong, nature & tool savvy literal-minded heroine we experience Martin's love and hatred through their daily life.

INCEST

“My Absolute Darling” is a debut novel for Gabriel Tallent.  Tallent’s first book is a subject that shocks the senses.  It reminds one of Nabokov’s “Lolita” in its insight to child abuse.  However, it adds the reprehensible dimension of incest.  Though Tallent is less lyrical than Nabokov, the disgust a listener feels as he processes the story is equivalent.

Both Tallent and Nabokov identify men of subsumed intelligence that rationalize sexual perversion.  Martin is father to a young girl who lost his wife.  The girl is named Julia but is generally called Turtle.  Turtle hides in a protective shell manufactured by her father.  The shell protects but also isolates her from the world.  Her view is her father’s view.  Her seduction is based on familial trust that is brutally and disgustingly enlisted by her father.

Tallent’s ending is at once compelling and disappointing.  It compels with its drama but disappoints in its resolution.  The disappointment is in the real-world complexity of stopping parental abuse. 

Brilliant

There is a line about 7/8 through this tough tale that places it next to the
Book mentioned in the line , classic well done micro epic.

The pain becomes background.
Other than the book named by name in the book ,
It reminds me most of blood meridian .
In the way the violence is secondary to the characters,
And I don't say that lightly.

So hard to listen to...

and worth it. The ending felt a little fast and abrupt given the long, slow story development, but the sense of the girl's Stockholm syndrome was very real.