Now, I gotta be honest here – this one was on my radar, but I just never fully clicked with it. Talent's writing is undeniably powerful, painting a vivid and unsettling picture of a young girl's harrowing journey. Yet, despite its raw intensity, I found myself struggling to fully connect with the story. Maybe it was the heavy subject matter or the pacing, but something just didn't grab me. That said, I could see why it resonated with many readers.

I really enjoyed this book when I read it, however I did not get to submit full review in time as unfortunately I lost my devices when my house was burgled and it took me a long time to replace my belongings and just get back on track. I have an ereader again (and a laptop, although I am not reactivating my blog and have started a bookstagram instead) and I hope to review again in the future.

Personally, I think the book just wasn't for me. Quite wordy and scattered. I think some areas of the book lacked focus and I think some of the more graphic parts of the book were described in too much detail, which I felt was unnecessary.

This was a book I couldn't put down, I read this book a few times now. I really got behind this book before it was published.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

a very intense story about an abusive relationship between a girl and her father, a powerful story that's extremely dark and not for the faint hearted.

Turtle Alveston is fourteen years old. She lives with her father at Slaughterhouse Creek. She knows how to shoot a gun, throw a knife, she knows how to skin a rabbit, she knows how to survive. It is what she does best. What she does not understand is why her father does the things he does, why he hurts her, then tells her he loves her.
But soon Turtle will have to face her biggest challenge yet. She must be careful because it goes against everything she has been taught. For this, she will have to find a new way of surviving.

My Absolute Darling handles some extremely sensitive and emotional themes and at times it can be quite violent and graphic. It certainly won't appeal to every reader out there. It's a stark and brutal exploration into one father/daughter relationship. It's breathtaking and horrifying, it chills you to the marrow of your bones. Not an easy read but doubtless an unforgettable and striking one.

Sorry to say this book just wasn’t for me. Although there is no doubt that the author is very talented (there were some really beautiful written passages) I found the extent of the violence and abuse to be just too much (shock factor overdose) and the character of Turtle just didn’t ring true for me. It felt like two completely different people rolled into one. I would give the author another go however as he can definitely write. Better luck next time.

I absolutely loved the writing style of this book.
I stayed up beyond midnight to finish this, and couldn’t get Turtle out of my head.
Highly recommended.

I can tell this book is an absolute gem but I cannot bring myself to read too much of it due to the nature of the story. I initially picked it up because I didn't realise just how intense and graphic the book would get, and therefore have had to stop reading. However, I can absolutely recommend this book to those who enjoy dark, stomach-twisting and intense storylines, and can definitely attest to how wonderfully well-written it is. If you love raw emotional hard-to-stomach books, certainly give this a read as it'll definitely be one you'll enjoy.

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent is an intoxicating, overwhelming, and intense novel about a young girl on the cusp of young womanhood and the claustrophobic life she leads under the firm hand of her father.
Turtle Alveston has lived alone with her father since her mother’s death. She has been sheltered from the everyday ordinary by her father and instead taught survival skills such as shooting. She is isolated and her world revolves around her insidious relationship with her dad.

My Absolute Darling is a coming of age novel in the most twisted and uncomfortable of ways. For me, the novel had an issue with pacing. For the first half I felt like it was very slow going but that did reflect the smallness and slowness of Turtle’s world. Then the story snowballed and it was the end. For a reader, it can be quite off-putting.

My Absolute Darling is a very disturbing novel. If you are planning on reading it then please be aware that there are a few triggering elements to the story.

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent is available now.

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This was one of those books that everyone was talking about.  I heard a lot about the unforgettable protagonist and repeated mentions of 'gorgeous prose' and how it was an incredible debut.  The word 'masterpiece' was bandied about.  Stephen King hailed it as a triumph.  Despite a couple of misgivings about the synopsis, I felt I needed to find out more.  Almost immediately though, distaste set in.  My Absolute Darling shoots high and I do not doubt the author's good intentions but as the book wore on, it became increasingly agonising to read.  Towards the end, my partner walked in and asked me what was wrong due to the expression on my face.  Having been determined to hang on until the bitter end, I reached the final pages with massive relief.  Unlike other pieces of fiction which tackle related topics, My Absolute Darling felt more of an exercise in voyeurism, violating the reader as well as the central character.

Turtle Alveston is fourteen years old and is a survivor.  She roams the woods around her California home, knows her way around a gun (many guns) and has no patience for those around her.  Growing up with only her survivalist father Martin, Turtle isolates herself from any offers of friendship at school and deflects the kindly inquiries of teachers.  Turtle is tough.  Turtle is strong.  She is essentially an action figure in the form of a teenage girl.  Yet despite how many reviews have praised her as a character, I found it impossible to connect with her.  She has no interiority and although at first I thought that the abuse she was going through had numbed her, Tallent then specifically had her note that it never touched her mind.  She never felt real.  The use of a first person narrator probably would have helped with this.

The worst part though was the sexual violence.  Martin's repeated rapes of his daughter are described in excessive detail with details around Turtle's 'engorged pussy' which felt really out of place in passages which are describing the violation of a child.  Tallent's recurring emphasis of how much Martin loves Turtle, that she is his whole world, his absolute darling - it all felt an unnecessary romanticisation.  It was as if he wanted to make the incest erotic.  While I understand that Tallent was trying to put across how blurred one's perspective can become after years of incest abuse, he takes things too far.  Reading the Guardian interview with Tallent, I felt very uncomfortable that Tallent described Martin as a 'visionary' and a 'tender father'.  Um - how about describing Martin for what he actually was, a pathetic abusive pedophile?  This is a man who forced his daughter to do pull-ups while holding a knife below her genitalia.  He called her 'kibble' and told her that she existed for him alone.  He beat her with a poker.  He violently raped her from childhood onwards.  To create a character quite this loathsome and to then praise any aspect of his parenting is repellent.

For all that Tallent claims to be celebrating Turtle as 'a person of great strength and personal resources and courage', there is a strong thread of misogyny that runs through My Absolute Darling.  Turtle's teacher notes that Turtle's own misogyny is one of the reasons she worries about the child's home life so I suppose that, again, Tallent is trying to use it artistically.  But for a central character to be repeatedly told that she is a 'bitch', an 'illiterate slit' or a 'see you next Tuesday' (they use the real version of the word in the book) and then to use those words against herself for the whole novel feels like a choice on the part of the author.  Turtle seems to exist only as an orifice and it was hard to believe that her creator truly respected her.  Tallent never even allows her to find her own method of escape.  She meets a boy, Jacob, who is clearly inserted in an effort to show Not All Men Are Bad and it is through this friendship that Turtle is able to question the world that Martin has built around her.  It never seems that she might have been able to get away without the prompting.

There were so many problematic aspects to My Absolute Darling.  Tallent's obsession with teenager Turtle's vagina disturbed me, even down to the way he described Turtle getting her first period.  The obsession with guns also seemed strange as firearms were not even that important to the overall plot.  I guess it was supposed to add a grittiness to the story?  There were also a whole heap of abandoned plot threads left hanging, such as the fate of Turtle's mother and what Brett's mother might have known about her.  Having worked in schools, it seemed improbable that more would not have been done to protect Turtle or at least check up on her home life.  Similarly, the ultimate resolution also seemed very implausible, like a bizarre version of Matilda.  And the 'gorgeous prose' which was promised?  Overwrought.  Excessive adjectives.  Deeply upsetting description of a dead dog being ripped to pieces.

For all that Tallent claims that we need more books like this 'about survivors and abuse', it's hard to see what his book really has to offer.  When I think back to how this craze began, with Emma Donnoghue's Room, we got an insight into how two people could bond together to survive an unspeakable experience.  Whenever I read about Stockholm Syndrome, I always remember Forgetting Zoe and how Zoe grew to feel affection towards her kidnapper because he was the only other human being she ever saw.  Neither of those books ever felt gratuitous in the way that My Absolute Darling does.  They never felt as though they had been written to titillate.  The authors steered the reader's eyes away when the worst was occurring, leaving us to focus on the psychology of the situation.  By contrast,Tallent abandons characterisation in favour of the reader feeling every agonising second of the violence.

I am not against fiction tackling dark topics but I resent the recent trend for writers to aim straight for the darkest and most brutal corners of the human experience in an attempt to win praise for their daring.  Just because something is shocking does not make it art.  Tallent has done very well from chronicling Turtle's abuse - comparisons have been made between My Absolute Darling and To Kill a Mockingbird.  Turtle has however none of Scout Finch's nuances and My Absolute Darling has too much in common with the slasher film industry to be able to offer any realistic insights into the the problem of evil.  Tallent's novel feels like Room meets Fifty Shades of Grey and that is a mish-mash which is wrong on every level.  It feels like a misuse of the pain which has been endured by thousands upon thousands of real women and young girls.  Maybe we do need more books about survivors and abuse, but based on My Absolute Darling, Tallent is not the author to write them.

By the end of chapter 1, I almost put this book down as I had no idea what on earth I was reading. I opened my Goodreads app to see what people were saying about it as I genuinely thought that, given the subject, it was going to be an horrendous read.
The reviews made me keep reading and while I'm not sure I agree with some of the higher ratings, I'm glad that I kept reading.
The book is a gruelling and, at times, horrific read that I can honestly say isn't enjoyable. But a book tells a tale regardless of whether the content makes us deliriously happy or devastatingly sad.
My Absolute Darling is long and painful and the subject matter will definitely put some people off reading, which I can completely understand.
There are parts of this book where it's more optimistic and makes the reader feel hopeful for Turtle/Julie/kibble but before long, the book returns to the disturbing horror from before, ramping up towards a devastating crescendo of an ending.
This was a difficult read but still one that I really wanted to keep reading after my initial shock. At times my heart was racing in anticipation of what was coming.

I struggled with rating this one. While the subject and events are disturbing, I did want to keep reading so I don't think I was disappointed by it. It's definitely not going to make you feel all warm and fuzzy in the end but still you can appreciate the journey travelled and the progress made, and this all sounds very cryptic but I don't want to give away any spoilers!

If you plan on reading My Absolute Darling, just be aware that it's heavy, difficult and disturbing but still manages to be a good book.

Thank you to Gabriel Tallent, NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

At times this was difficult to read due to the subject of abuse but it is well worth persevering. Ultimately it is a story of survival. I look forward to Gabriel Tallent’s next offering.

To start with, Tallent obviously has talent - it has to be said. This is an accomplished debut about the life of Turtle Alveston (aka Julia/Kibble), living on a remove farm with her psychopathic, controlling father, Martin.

The life Turtle leads is unconventional to say the least. She is an outcast at school; she doesn’t fit in; she is awkward but persecuted and, sadly, the victim of abuse by her father which is part of the course for her.

Early in the novel, one thinks she’s escaped when she befriends Brett and Jacob. However, she is drawn back to the farm where the awful treatment continues. She loses her beloved (but hated by Martin), grandfather. A girl arrives - Cayenne - after Martin returns from a three-month hiatus. Tallent makes the reader ask many questions and, at times, it’s frustrating why Turtle doesn’t escape - she certainly has opportunities to do so. Caroline, mother of Jacob and an old friend of Turtle’s parents, has a surprisingly small role. After returning Turtle to her home, I would have thought she would have kept a closer eye on her but not so.

There is a dramatic near-drowning off the coast of Northern California near Turtle’s home town of Mendocino; there is scorpion-eating which made me groan, out loud. There’s a shoot-out, too. But at the end, redemption and peace, at least superficially.

This is a challenging read in some respects and does leave a nasty taste. It made me want to help Turtle but somehow she needed to help herself a bit more.

I am aware this book came out last year (2017) it’s one I’ve been meaning to read but dreading.

There are lots that love it, some that don’t.
And it’s been sitting on my kindle taking a back seat.

I wasn’t sure which half I’d fall into. I do now.

Although this book is well written with some great use of scenic events, well written graphic details that will thoroughly make you cringe I was still shocked.

I’m not shocked easily as I have read so many heart rending books true and fiction. From rape, abuse to mind rocketing gasping screams from me when there are such horrid things written in a book.
But this one was darker than dark, in fact, it was pitch black!

An uncomfortable read for sure.

I did find on occasion my mind wandering. I guessed what would happen and how Turtle would learn to survive.

The thing is though, there have been so many similar books written with the same type of plot/subject matter which in my humble opinion has been written much better.
The Marshes daughter similar and much better in its entirety.

Publishing houses compare books when trying to sell another book so why can’t us readers also compare another book to someone else’s?

I love dark books.
But I could have easily have passed this book over for something else. I’m stubborn so I read it until the end.

Great writing but for me, I found a lot of the narration tedious too.


Thank you Harper Collins UK via Net Galley (

A chilling novel. The story of homeschooling gone horribly wrong and the subversion of a child's love for a father. Worryingly plausible too.

A gripping account of an abusive relationship with a sympathetic and believable protagonist.

I loved this book and have widely recommended it.

Brilliantly written, riveting, and horrifying at the same time, above all it feels credible. The author knows his subject.

An absolute soul wrenching book - beautifully written with wonderful descriptive detail. Difficult subject matter is dealt with sensitively but head on, making it an important, unforgettable read.

I found this book very readable and the story was interesting - but I did sometimes find the dialogue and some of the action quite implausible. Also .... way too much about guns!