Book Review - My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

There are two camps of readers when it comes to Gabriel Tallent’s breakthrough debut novel “My Absolute Darling” — those who are naming it among the best of the year (the Washington Post, Amazon.com, Stephen King, to name a few — and I’m sure it will hit more best-of lists before the year is up) and those who are infuriated by the content and think it should never have been written at all. If you’re not a follower of the book review community, it’s not the gentle, quiet, cardigan-wearing group you might imagine.

Julia “Turtle” Alveston is a 14-year-old being raised by her father on the northern California coast. Her mother died when she was young; her father, a survivalist, keeps her mainly isolated in their home in the woods. 

She attends school, but he’s instilled a strong suspicion of everyone in her so she keeps to herself. Her father and her grandfather, whose health is declining, are her whole world — and her father fluctuates between being her best friend and abusing her in every way you can imagine.

Turtle meets a pair of local boys in the woods, and through her relationship with them, she begins to see a larger world outside of the one her father has built for the two of them — but her father, sensing her pulling away, becomes more violent and begins drawing others into his warped definition of love. Turtle has to draw on strength she isn’t sure she has in order to survive.

The issue a number of readers are having with this book is that they don’t believe a male author has the ability to write a female victim of sexual violence — they see it as exploitative, written for shock value rather than literary value, and offensive, lessening the experiences of these victims. 

I’m not going to completely discount this point of view — I believe that there are books like this, where the characters are two-dimensional and the authors have no business writing about such things, where they are just for the attention such books bring.

However, I also strongly believe that this is not one of those books.

Although Turtle’s story is shocking and Tallent pulls no punches in telling it, it wouldn’t be as brilliant of a book (and it is a brilliant, breathtaking book) if he were to tiptoe around the dark, ugly shadows that make up her life. We need to experience her entire character arc in order for it to punch us in the gut as hard as it does.

As for whether a male author has the right — or ability — to write from a female point of view, especially about topics such as this (or vice-versa) ... a good author doesn’t have to be the same gender as the characters they’re writing about. 

A good author doesn’t have to have experienced everything their characters have. A good author doesn’t have to have lived where their characters have. 

A good author will research these things, talk to people who have had these experiences, visit these places — and then use their imagination and make up a world for us to fall into.

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Original review on: http://www.watertowndailytimes.com