My Absolute Darling
Gabriel Tallent
Penguin
<span>A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.</span><span><br><br>Turtle  Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the  northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are  her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for  miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is  small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of  her mother, in the thrall of her tortured and charismatic father,  Martin. Her social existence is confined to the middle school (where she  fends off the interest of anyone, student or teacher, who might  penetrate her shell) and to her life with her father.<br><br>Then Turtle  meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes, lives in a big clean  house, and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first  time, the larger world begins to come into focus: her life with Martin  is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with  real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape,  using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching  her. What follows is a harrowing story of bravery and redemption. With  Turtle's escalating acts of physical and emotional courage, the reader  watches, heart in throat, as this teenage girl struggles to become her  own hero—and in the process, becomes ours as well.<br><br>Shot through with striking language in a fierce natural setting,</span><span> My Absolute Darling</span><span> is an urgently told, profoundly moving read that marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer.</span>