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Loading... The Little Friend (2002)by Donna Tartt
  
Southern Fiction (29) Best Gothic Fiction (38) » 26 more Best Family Stories (70) Favorite Long Books (137) Top Five Books of 2016 (513) Books Read in 2010 (12) Female Protagonist (471) Books Read in 2004 (41) Books About Girls (73) Read These Too (81) Five star books (1,259) Biggest Disappointments (111) Books Read in 2003 (107) No current Talk conversations about this book. Donna Tartt is an amazing writer. I would love to know more about her and for her to write more books. This is my second book by her; I previously read The Goldfinch and absolutely loved it. It’s one of my all time favorite books. I was unaware of this book until I received a signed copy for Christmas a couple of years ago. I finally got around to reading it. While I liked the writing and story well enough to stick with it, I wasn’t sure where the story was headed. I was intrigued and enjoying the characters of Harriet and Hely so I stuck with it. These two kids sure knew how to get into mischief and push the limits. The death of Harriet’s older brother, when she was a baby, was a mystery I wanted to see a resolution. No one knew what happened nor was an arrest ever made for the murder. The story became pretty intense and my curiosity was peaked. Unfortunately, the ending was flat. It seemed like the author pulled together a vague ending that not only left me wanting more, it was like she got tired of writing and just ended the book. At 555 pages, I was pretty committed to the story and think it deserved a way better ending. I would have gladly hung out for another 50 or even 100 pages for a thorough ending. Lastly, the title of the book never made sense to me. Maybe I’m clueless and missed the connection. And the cover is totally creepy. Overall, I fell in love Harriet and Hely and miss them already. They are the reason I’m giving this book 4 stars. (  ) NatalieRiley | Jun 17, 2023 |  Whilst I enjoyed the way that Donna has the ability to immerse the reader in a scene and paint believable characters I felt this book fell a bit short for me. I felt this book was a series of vignettes instead of a cohesive connected story - Perhaps I went in with the wrong expectations and preconceived notions of what I thought this would be instead of letting myself be immersed in the writing. It just didn't work for me. (  ) Casey_Howe | Jun 15, 2023 | DNF, plain and simple. Having read the Goldfinch and a couple of others, this story bogs down with too much detail and moves along like a snail. Coming off the high from Fight Club, I simply cannot see investing the time. On to bigger things! ( ) Jonathan5 | Feb 20, 2023 | A real literary page-turner. A terrific semi-whodunit through the eyes of an iconoclastic 12-year old girl. Beautifully captures the Deep South circa the mid-70s. (  ) joemillerii | Oct 19, 2022 | I am afraid I didnt like or understand it. (  ) Litrvixen | Jun 23, 2022 |
 Though the world Harriet discovers is unquestionably haunted, there is nothing magical about it, or about the furious, lyrical rationality of Tartt's voice. Her book is a ruthlessly precise reckoning of the world as it is -- drab, ugly, scary, inconclusive -- filtered through the bright colors and impossible demands of childhood perception. It grips you like a fairy tale, but denies you the consoling assurance that it's all just make-believe. Comparisons, in any case, are beside the point. This novel may be a hothouse flower, but like that fatal black tupelo tree, it has ''its own authority, its own darkness.'' ''This was the hallmark of Harriet's touch,'' Hely reflects. ''She could scare the daylights out of you, and you weren't even sure why.'' Harriet's gift is also Tartt's. ''The Little Friend'' might be described as a young-adult novel for grown-ups, since it can carry us back to the breathless state of adolescent literary discovery, when we read to be terrified beyond measure and, through our terror, to try to figure out the world and our place in it.  But this novel is not directly about a murder. It is about the effect that the murder has on the dead boy's family, and especially on his sister Harriet, who was less than a year old when he died, and is 12 when the novel begins. It is through Harriet's desire to come to terms with the past and find her brother's killer that Tartt paints her vision of family life in the American South. As Harriet trudges through one lonely summer, encountering misunderstanding, bereavement, solitude and straightforward cruelty, she drifts further and further into her obsessions. Eventually other, tougher, meaner characters are dragged into her warped world and she is almost destroyed by her attempts to exact pointless revenge on individuals who bear illogical grudges against her. With its pre-teen sleuths on bicycles, its broad-brush villains and oddly invisible police, The Little Friend courts absurdity time and again. A novel about the force and fraud of children's literature, it shares plenty of improbable conventions with that genre. It also flirts at every stage with kitsch and, in so doing, muddles the categories of "literary" and "popular" fiction even more thoroughly than The Secret History did. Critical puritans (or merely Yankees) will point to its Dixie weakness for verbosity, caricature and melodrama. Yet the verbosity yields passages of mesmerising beauty; the caricature, stretches of delirious comedy; and the melodrama, moments of nerve-shredding excitement.  Southern Gothic is an American literary genre with no British equivalent. It uses lush prose with a strong sense of Southern literary heritage (Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor), is set in the former Confederacy, and features at least three of the following ingredients: insanity, incest, inbreeding, extreme meteorological phenomena, fundamentalist religion, corrupt preachers, slave-owner guilt, black rage, fading gentility, violent white trash, fragrant subtropical plants. At least one main character always dies. Donna Tartt's second novel, The Little Friend, is a spacious and ambitious example of Southern Gothic. Like her best-selling 1992 début, "The Secret History," this long-awaited second novel takes the shape of a murder mystery, but it's not really about a death at all. It's about a way of life. Tartt, who was born in Mississippi, has set her new book in her home state, in a shabby riverside town called Alexandria. From the start, it's clear that the corruptions that interest her most are the familiar ones: ingrained, almost casual racism; hostility between the white-trash "plain people" and the "town folk" like Robin's maternal relatives, the Cleves, with their faded aristocratic pretensions; and—inevitably, in the literature of the South—the stranglehold of the past. Is contained inHas as a student's study guide
Fiction.
Literature.
Suspense.
Thriller.
HTML:NATIONAL BESTSELLER ? From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. ? ??Destined to become a special kind of classic.? ??The New York Times Book Review 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. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and ??a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens? (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad e No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.41)
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