Our review called Tallent “fearless when evoking what the body can withstand” and "scrupulous at capturing the visible world,” even if he did not delve as deeply into the characters’ interiority. When she meets a boy, her isolation from the world and the unsustainability of her life with her father comes into focus, and she starts to plot her escape. The heroine of this novel, Turtle, is a 14-year-old girl growing up in the forests of Northern California with her father, Martin, a tortured widower who has been teaching her survival skills since she was a child. MY ABSOLUTE DARLING by Gabriel Tallent (2017) Livia volunteered to take the brunt of their abuse to spare her sister, and according to our reviewer, “These sections are hard to read, but never gratuitous, and, like the whole book, feel emotionally true at each beat.” The present action finds Livia back in the United States, trying to track down her sister, from whom she was separated, as well as her abusers. This thriller centers on a Seattle police officer named Livia, whose parents sold her and her sister, Nason, to a gang of Thai traffickers as children. According to our reviewer, “what might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time.” Susie is able to stay connected to her family by watching them from heaven, but witnessing their lives - especially the rites of passage of her teenage sister, which she’ll never experience - makes her yearn for her life on Earth. This book is told from the perspective of Susie Salmon from the afterlife after she is raped and murdered.