My Absolute Darling

It was a rollercoaster read but definitely a lot of comfortable parts I wish i would have known about prior. Definitely would heed warning about trigger warnings about abuse, and rape are the big ones.

Sometimes less is more and there lies the main problem with this book, could easily have been 100 pages shorter. So much of it is ridiculous and I refuse to believe that out of all the people who suspected something was “going on”, not one of them intervened or made that call, and all because they live in free thinking part of North California. In the end it feels like a mash up of Swallows and Amazons and Serbian Film. If you are thinking of reading this do your research first. Read the one star reviews because the majority of those are spot on.

If you want shock and awe read Hal Ketchum's The Girl Next Door.
If you want uplifting cuddles read Emma Donoghue's Room.

The above books do everything this books tries to do but much much better.

Disturbing and haunting.

*2.5 stars. Writing is descriptive and violently beautiful but the repetitious brutality wore me to the bone. The moments of redemption were just too few and far between and while it is clearly a meditation on mental illness, the celebratory nature of the blunted horror of it was just not appealing to me.

I read this in 2 sittings, and it's been a while since I was this eager to run home to dive back into a book (last was probably Ferrante's [b:The Neapolitan Novels 26828169 The Neapolitan Novels Elena Ferrante https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443412457s/26828169.jpg 46858867]). Turtle is 14 and she could be a heroine in a postapocalyptic future, but she lives in the here and now. Emotionally isolated from society she grows up with her survivalist misogynist abusive father, who teaches her how to handle shotguns and the wild nature of the Californian coast. Then a window opens up in the form of a friendship with same-aged teenage boys, and Turtle needs to learn how to detach from her father while trying to make sense of all the horrible things she's learned to endure. Trigger warnings, this is a dark haunting tale, but it's so absorbing and Turtle is magnificent, and all the side characters are memorable, and you'll be on the edge of your seat. Plus the writing is fantastic.

Disturbing. Beautiful. Frustrating. Disgusting. Exhilarating. Exhausting. I don't know the right words to describe this book. I suppose the obvious comparison would be to Lolita, but the violence and more objective point-of-view of this novel make this a more difficult novel to stomach. At times it's a book that's difficult to read, and at times it's a book that I couldn't put down.