Book: The Little Friend
Author: Donna Tartt
Pages: 555
Read On: Paperback
How Long it Took Me To Read: 4 days
Plot Summary: The Little Friend is a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.
The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss.
General Thoughts: This is the second Tartt novel I've read. I read and LOVED The Secret History ( I really should talk about this book on the blog, soon!) and last year my sister read and reviewed The Goldfinch- you can read it HERE. Honestly, I have no intention of reading the Goldfinch, it just doesn't sound like something I'll enjoy.
But this book sounded like up my alley. It was on my wishlist for ages and I finally bought it last year from a bookstore. I was so excited to finally have the book I've wanted for ages. I was so excited!
Things I Liked:
1. Donna Tartt's writing is simply wonderful. She is a very, very gifted writer and story teller and I enjoyed the prose of this book.
2. I love stories about families- the bigger, the messier and the more complicated the better. And this book at it's very core is a book about family. I loved this aspect of it.
3. The book is told in a panoramic style, where we see each character and get to see the world from their point of view and hear their voice and hear thier side of the story. This was we get to know and understand almost every single character in this book.
4. The setting is lovely and it just comes to life and leaps off the pages. A hot summer in Mississippi in the 1970s, just seemed real and alive and close enough to touch. Clearly a work of a very gifted writer.
5. As much as I love books about families, I LOVE books about dysfunctional families even more. And this family, in the aftermath of a gruesome and unsolved crime were so very interesting to read about. Whether it's Charlotte (the mother of Robin and Harriet) who has fallen apart and doesn't really function as a parent or spouse anymore or the children themselves- Allison and Harriet who are growing up in a house where no one really is parenting them was a very interesting reading.
6. This is also a book full of very interesting women. I mean this family is practically all women and I just adored it.
7. Also any book with a murder mystery is so my thing!
8. Harriet's character and her thinking and her loneliness was so well crafted. You really got to know her so well through the course of this book.
9. The investigation that Harriet undertakes was also incredibly realistic.
Things I Didn't Like:
Oh boy!
1. The font in my 555 pages book was so small . So tiny that it hurt my head. Andddd each page had so many lines crammed in and it just made this already dense book feel even more dense. Not nice at all!
2. Harriet for all her smarts and precociousness was pretty stupid when she fixates on one person as the murder suspect and just stays with it. It makes no sense. I get it she is 12 and obviously not an expert but for someone who is shown as being really clever and bright, this was a stupid move. Especially since the said suspect was 9 yrs old himself when the crime was committed.
3. My BIGGEST GROUSE with the book was at the end of 555 pages of tiny as fuck font...you aren't told who killed Robin. Yup. The book ends...and you don't know who the killer is. WHAT?????????? I get it, I really, really get it that this is literary fiction and it's main goal is not to be run of the mill whodunnit. I really get it. But you know what? It still annoyed the fuck out of me when at the end of such a long, dense book we are left without any answer. I enjoyed several aspects of this book but the end just does not sit well with me. I hate vague endings in general. But when a murder mystery is involved...I find it infuriating that we weren't given answers! I wanted to hurl this book at the wall by the end...I didn't of course...I love books far too much to inflict violence on them.
Rating: 2.5/5
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