Book Review: My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

04.28.2020

By Zara Reed

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Category:
Author: Gabriel Tallent
Format: Trade Paperback, 420 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Books, imprint of Penguin Random House
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1117-9
Pub Date: August 29, 2017

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Summary from Publisher:

At 14, Turtle Alveston knows the use of every gun on her wall. She knows how to snare a rabbit, sharpen a blade and splint a bone. She knows that her daddy loves her more than anything else in this world and he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her with him.

But she doesn’t know why she feels so different from the other girls at school; why the line between love and pain can be so hard to see. Or why making a friend may be the bravest and most terrifying thing she has ever done.

Sometimes the people you’re supposed to trust are the ones who do most harm. And what you’ve been taught to fear is the very thing that will save you…

From Goodreads

Book Review:

The novel, My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent, is a haunting novel that reverberates the lyrical mastery of language and the poise of intelligence and gifted craftsmanship. The novel reduces readers into a world that is enthralling and vast as its setting, much like the encompassing bewilderment and dangers of nature, yet terrifies and nullifies comprehension and belief with its taut tension and abrasive cruelty.

This is a book that readers will not simply peruse and superficially consider but will submerge themselves under from the weight of its raw violence and emotional complexity.

The characters are neither cliched, nor superficial, but carved out of imagination and realism.

Turtle Alveston is tragically unique in her isolated upbringing, more a child to the wild than she is to civilization; and calculated in her precision and self-efficacy in deftly meeting her intended targets at the barrel of her gun. She knows the wilderness, mapping it out through the barefooted soles of her calloused feet, recognizing territory through foliage species to the anatomy of riverbeds and the wildlife beneath. The wilderness, simultaneously her escape and her prison, hides her from a world that always pulls her back to her tormenter, Martin Alveston, her father.

Martin Alveston is broad in body as he is narrow in his apocalyptic thinking; cruel as they consider him charismatic; and possessed with the compulsion to control, manipulate, and torment his daughter; possessive of her whereabouts, driven to obsession and madness of who she is, and that she fully and wholly belongs only to him.

Other characters transpire around her, those that provide newness, solace, sometimes hope: Daniel Alveston, her grandfather, who affectionately calls her Sweetpea; Jacob Learner and his friend, Brett, boys she encounters in the wilderness who expose her to peer connection and the possibility of friendship; Anna, a schoolteacher whose belief in her ability to grow and thrive finally convinces her to reconsider her efforts; and Cayenne, a younger sister figure that compels her to action.

The plot is vividly tense with its movement between safety and terror, calm and intensity, speculation and self-deprecation. It is taut with raw, graphic cruelty and dark violence that it is, at times, extremely difficult to read. The story is a legacy to survival in its most desperate form. And the hardness of its main characters are complex and emotionally intertwined by psychosomatic symptoms rooted in a turbulent and traumatic past.

The language and narrative, though, is fluent in its lyrical eloquence, lush in its precision, and exacting in its brutality. The dialogue, both internal and external, are convincingly realistic that the characters become vivid caricatures extrapolated from imagination and fiction, but also unforgettable people with whom the reader becomes most intimate.

The pacing is close to perfect, though a section of the plot could have been easily omitted to move the story further and faster to its climactic peak.

And the cover design is as deceptive and secretive of the story’s contents as the characters and plot itself, leaving the reader to imagine what its dark heroine, Turtle Alveston and her tormentor, Martin Alveston, look like and what may recede behind the thick foliage of the forest that isolates them both from the world.

This is a dark and emotionally wrought novel that will inflict you with fear and courage, hoping for the ultimate emancipation and freedom for its most tormented characters. It will make you witness the horrifying, yet deeply complex nature of love, hate, dependence, deprivation, compulsion, possession, and hardened will that exists in the relationships of complex trauma. And it will move you to fear, to anguish—and to tears.

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Characters: 5 stars
Plot: 5 stars
Language/Narrative: 5 stars
Dialogue: 5 stars
Pacing: 4 stars
Cover Design: 4 stars

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Rating

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A special thanks to Penguin Random House Canada on behalf of Riverhead Books for providing me with a copy of My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent in exchange for an honest and timely review.

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About the Author:

From Penguin Random House Canada website

Gabriel Tallent is the author of the New York Times-bestselling novel My Absolute Darling. He 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.