Review: The Absolutes by Molly Dektar

The Absolutes by Molly Dektar

Blurb from Goodreads:

A moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric novel about a young woman's affair with an Italian aristocrat that leaves her spiraling in the face of love, danger, and obsession.

When Nora, an anxious and withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy. They forge a sudden, powerful connection in a chairlift several hundred feet above the Alps, where Nicola, brimming with old-world wealth and secrets, eases Nora back from the verge of a panic attack. In an instant, Nora forgets the feelings she's been harboring for her host sister since arriving in Italy, and a sharper, more reckless feeling takes hold: blind trust and insatiable desire for Nicola.

Years later in New York, when Nicola becomes enmeshed in a covert, high-stakes business venture at the company where Nora works, the two begin an affair. But Nora is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when unrelenting currents of obsession, control, and revenge intensify their passion and entangle her in a secret plot to overthrow Nicola's corrupt father. Soon, she must decide for herself what makes a person truly evil and what she's willing to excuse for a chance at total intimacy.

Utterly seductive, fiercely intelligent, and achingly beautiful, The Absolutes is a revealing portrait of a relationship that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Molly Dektar has crafted a hypnotic, provocative, and profound study of desire. 

My Review:
This was interesting and, yes, thrilling but also a bit dark. I had no idea where it was going and it didn't really go anywhere but I enjoyed it all the same. It is very cerebral but if you've ever been obsessed with a person, you will fall into it quite easily. I definitely recommend this if you like beautiful writing and stories about obsession, even those that are a bit dark.

The Absolutes comes out next week on July 11, 2023, and you can purchase HERE!  I really liked this one!

What is the feeling of something being better than you remembered? Something quite a lot better than you remembered doesn't feel like the same thing but somehow improved, like, for example, an apple but 10 percent sweeter. Instead it feels like a new thing. Like you thought you were holding an apple, but you bit into a nectarine. Alien, unresolved, toxic maybe.