Dangerous Love
Gabriel Tallent’s first novel, My Absolute Darling is a bleak disturbing yet always gripping story of 14-year-old Julia ‘Turtle’ Alveston, who lives with her father Martin in a distant shack. Her grandfather, Daniel, lives in a trailer nearby and disapproves of the way the kid is being raised by her father.
On the one hand he teaches her to handle guns be tough and on the other mentally and physically abuses her so badly, that the girl loathes herself and is confused about her feelings for him. Because Martin discourages interactions with anyone outside, Turtle has no friends at school, and is not even allowed counselling when a sympathetic teacher, Anna, want to help her.
Martin is a despicable monster, who idea of expressing love is violence. But, like victims of Stockholm Syndrome, who get attached to their abductors, Turtle is tied to her father, because, as he keeps emphasising, “You are mine.”
In Turtle’s decrepit home, she eats raw eggs, the dishes are left outside for the raccoons to lick clean, and she runs about the forest barefoot, with her gun for company.
The fierce-yet-vulnerableTurtle realizes that other people do not live like her when she encounter two boys lost in the woods, Jacob and Brett, who treat her as a buddy and invite her into their clean, warm, loving world. They jokingly call her “the chain-saw-wielding, shotgun-toting, Zen Buddhist, once-and-future queen of postapocalyptic America,” as fascinated by her toughness as she is with their wit.
When Jacob and she fall in love—though she has trouble understanding or articulating the emotion—her father goes wild. And when he turns up after a long absence with another little girl, Cayenne, Turtle knows it is time to escape.
If description of the lush landscape are poetic, the violence is brutal, and the story moves towards a predictable tragedy, still, the reader avidly waits for the explosion. This is not an easy book to read, but heralds a brave new voice in literary fiction.
My Absolute Darling
By Gabriel Tallent
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 417
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