My Absolute Darling
Gabriel Tallent, 2017
Penguin Publishing
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735211179
Summary
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.
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1988
• Raised—Mendicino, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Willamette University
• Currently—lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Gabriel Tallent was born in New Mexico and raised on the Mendocino coast by two mothers. He received his B.A. from Willamette University in 2010, and after graduation spent two seasons leading youth trail crews in the backcountry of the Pacific Northwest. Tallent lives in Salt Lake City. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Gabriel Tallent’s debut novel about an abused 14-year-old girl is explosive, and glorious.
Newsday
Every once in awhile there comes along a fictional character—Jane Eyre, Kunta Kinte, Jude St. Francis—whose plight and determination to overcome subsumes the reader so completely, we actually feel ourselves missing him or her after the final page. Turtle, the adolescent protagonist of Gabriel Tallent's debut novel, is that and so much more. For her unconventional wisdom and indomitable inner strength, and for Tallent's descriptive dexterity, which makes everything from Turtle's physical anguish to the smells and sensations of the lush California wilderness around her leap off the page—this is one of the most important books you'll pick up this decade.
Harper's Bazaar
One of EW's favorite books of the year so far…an unputdownable coming-of-age novel.
Entertainment Weekly
In his ferocious, heart-breaking first novel, Tallent deciphers the twisted relationship between Turtle Alveston and her rugged loner father, Martin.… Tallent combines gorgeous passages about the wilderness Turtle knows well and a steady beat of dramatic tension in this smashing debut.
BBC - Between the Lines
[A] gripping, vivid debut.… Readers will root for Turtle as she sets out to escape and be absorbed by Tallent’s stunning descriptions of nature.
RealSimple
Room meets Rambo in this emotionally fraught first novel.… In Turtle, Tallent has crafted a resourceful and resilient character.… In the end, though, Turtle’s story is harrowingly visceral.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Few coming-of-age stories deliver the sheer lyrical power of Tallent’s debut … Lucidly written, both heartbreaking and heartfelt, this book is ultimately affirmative without the slightest sentimentality, and it’s remarkable.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Turtle is an extraordinary character whose thoughts and actions enliven the pages of Tallent’s remarkable first novel…. So vivid is the gorgeously realized setting that it becomes itself a major character in a novel that lingers in the mind long after the final page.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A 14-year-old girl struggles to escape her father's emotional and physical abuse in this harrowing debut. Turtle … is a remarkable teenage hero, heavily damaged but admirably persistent. A powerful, well-turned story about abuse, its consequences, and what it takes to survive it.
Kirkus Reviews
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