Quite a lot to bite off, more than 800 pages of novel. This is rich fare, though not indigestible. Here we have, Theo, a New York boy with an absent father. His mother has to take the morning of work to go to school with her son, who's not behaving. They go to her favourite place, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And there is an explosion. She dies. He steals Fabritius' tiny masterpiece, the Goldfinch. And this is the story of their time together.

A moment by moment account of his life, from his being fostered, to his move to Las Vegas to stay with his pretty hopeless father, where he meets a fellow lost soul, Boris. The Goldfinch and his increasing guilt and fear at having taken it inform his life and get him into deeper and deeper water.

This is a rich, complex, involving story. I wanted to read on, but was often scared to do so for fear of what I might learn. Only the ending disappointed. But this is a fine plot, with fine characters and fine prose. Read it ( )

Donna Tartt please write shorter books, thank you. ( )

I'll probably be thinking about this novel for a long time. It's at times difficult, but always arresting and beautiful to read. I was much more impressed with this one than The Little Friend which I'd read some years ago.

I think what strikes me the most about this one is how well it gets across that hard to explain thing about some pieces of art, whether it's paintings like the Goldfinch in the story, photographs, poems or novels. That thing that gets under your skin and makes you possessive about the work of someone else. The way it speaks to you, as she says, across the years. I was touched, and you can't ask for much more than that. ( )

I loved this book! I think it was a wonderful and tragic story of a boy suffering through life and experiencing love and loss and friendship and struggling without guidance from a loving, caring and capable parental figure. I laughed, I cringed at the terrible decisions, my heart broke for the characters at times and the ending was perfectly realistic.
Unfortunately I do not feel the same about the movie...but the book was well worth the 700 plus pages! ( )

Donna Tartt, a writer of prodigious talent, again takes a decade to write a novel north of six hundred pages; of course its ambitious. Opening with a scenario reminiscent of 9/11, its two main themes would seem to be the emotional damage inflicted on survivors (here, Theo, a boy of 13 at the time of the bombing) and the role of art, of beauty, in the world (here represented primarily in the painting The Goldfinch by Fabritius).

Certainly Tartt develops these themes with great skill. Yet as a reader I feel some frustration from the fact that there is a third theme, that of the powerfully bonded adolescent friendship and its later evolution, that I wish had received more of Tartt's attention and development.

Such was my mistaken first impression of the only friend I made when I was in Vegas, and - as it turned out - one of the great friends of my life.
His name was Boris. Somehow we found ourselves standing together in the crowd that was waiting for the bus after school that day.
"Hah. Harry Potter," he said, as he looked me over.
"Fuck you," I said listlessly."

Boris is the Polish/Ukrainian son of a violently alcoholic single father. He and Theo, both emotionally damaged and largely on their own, survive together on the desert, and deserted, outskirts of Vegas, in a miasma of vodka, cocaine and scrounged/stolen food. Their relationship sometimes seems to spin outside the bounds of the merely platonic. When Theo's negligent father is killed, he runs away back to New York where he lived with his mother prior to the terrorist act that took her from him. He urges Boris to come with him, but this does not end up occurring. Their parting, though not likely intended to be by Tartt, strikes me as the emotional center of the novel, she writes it so powerfully.

"But the guy said as long as the money in my fund was used for education - it could be anybody's education. Not just mine. There's more than enough for both of us. Though, I mean, public school, the public schools are good in New York, I know people there, public school's fine with me."
I was still babbling when Boris said: "Potter." Before I could answer him he put both hands on my face and kissed me on the mouth. And while I stood blinking - it was over almost before I knew what had happened - he picked up Popper under the forelegs and kissed him too, in midair, smack on the tip of the nose...
"Good luck," said Boris. "I won't forget you." Then he patted Popper on the head. "Bye, Popchyk. Look after him, will you?" he said to me.
Later - in the cab, and afterward - I would replay that moment, and marvel that I'd waved and walked away quite so casually. Why hadn't I grabbed his arm and begged him one last time to get in the car, come on, fuck it Boris, just like skipping school, we'll be eating breakfast over cornfields when the sun comes up?...
More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street - which was, of course, I love you.

It will be a decade until Boris comes back into the picture, apparently driven by a mixture of devotion and guilt that he feels towards Theo. By this time Boris is some sort of mid level gangster figure in the Russian underworld and he is eager to lead Theo on a sketchy quest towards what he believes will be a great reward. Theo, unhappily engaged to a beautiful but cold society girl and still dealing with personal demons, allows himself to be dragged along despite misgivings, and nearly to the doom he has been circling around since that day when he was 13 years old. ( )