Raw. Confrontational. Brilliant.

A terrifying and inspiring read.

Turtle Alveston is fourteen and lives alone with her survivalist father, whom she fondly calls daddy. The author, Gabriel Tallent, has written a harrowing and confronting examination of an abusive relationship, the material so challenging at times that you almost flinch. This story is raw, just like the eggs Turtle cracks straight into her mouth for breakfast each morning, throwing her daddy a beer as she does so.

            Turtle’s inner monologue propels the narrative, and it’s here that we gain an understanding of her strength. As a reader, I found myself willing Turtle to prevail and simply couldn’t put the book down such was my concern for her. Tallent said he wanted to “write a story of resistance, of someone fighting to be the right person. Her circumstances, maybe we understand to be shameful, but that’s not her fault.”

            I was also interested in the fact the book is written by a man with the lead protagonist being a young woman. I watched an interview with Tallent and he talked about this:

            “When you are writing fiction about someone you are not, someone different from you – you’re always writing across a divide of privilege, you’re writing across the table of gender, and it can be blinding. What I tried to do was bring my own vantage point – I had seen things that were important, and I understood things to be true and I wanted to write those as I had seen them. Fiction becomes a project of trying to see other people clearly.”

            The omnipresence of guns throughout the story is frightening, Turtle herself being an accomplished gun-handler. Yet, for me, the guns were overshadowed by the more sinister threat of violence posed by the looming presence of the unhinged and unpredictable father. Tallent talks about how he wanted to “try and show the awfulness of violence to get the point across, that hurting children is wrong – that the legacy of it is terrible.”

            I wondered how female readers might respond to this novel and jumped online to check reviews. From what I could see the response from female reviewers was unequivocally affirmative. There was recognition that My Absolute Darling whilst a harrowing read is nonetheless a brilliant book.

In the digital dark, who will we turn to?

Read this thought-provoking novella a little while back and was blown away by its quiet authority and dazzling simplicity. Something compelled me to retrieve it from the shelf today and flick through the pages, scanning, recollecting.

Set in a near future Manhattan, it explores the unthinkable: What if the digital world we've all come to rely on should fail. Here follows a short transcript.

Something happened then. The images onscreen began to shake. It was not ordinary visual distortion, it had depth, it formed abstract patterns that dissolved into rhythmic pulse, a series of elementary units that seemed to thrust forward and then recede. Rectangles, triangles, squares.

They watched and listened. But there was nothing to listen to.

Spooky, huh? I recommend you seek out this dark little gem of a story, it won't disappoint.

Margin Scrawls

I like to annotate books as I read. Highlighting with underlines, asterisks, and margin notes.

The exquisite sentence.

The sparkling section of dialogue.

The repeated motif or developing theme.

The stunning twist of plot.

The use of an unexpected simile.

The early mention of a possible ‘Chekhov’s gun’ – though it may come in the form of a crossbow, knife, or paperweight.

It’s an interesting paradox that in the act of scribbling the reading experience is enhanced, perhaps through greater comprehension?

I get the sense of being more immersed in the writing. Attuned to its nuances.

The reward of making annotations, months or years later, is picking up a novel and re-discovering the moments that moved me.

Because of these invaluable hieroglyphic markings, I don’t lend out my books.

Borrowers might judge that I have defaced the books. Vandalised the sanctity of the page.

For me, though, I have left a bread-crumb trail of precious gems.