Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A little lost, 13 Jul 2008
Donna Tartt has chosen some tough acts to follow with her second book: William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Carson McCulloch, some of the greats of literature have set their work in America's South and at least two have chosen as their subject girls on the edge of puberty. Perhaps it's unfair to judge Tartt's book against these, but the comparisons are inevitable. Having said that, she does a fair job. The strength of her writing (as with many female authors in my opinion) is her eye for detail. She recreates a small Mississippi town in the 1970s, right down to the boiled peanuts and Country Club swimming pool, the smiley face t-shirts and Wacky Pack stickers. The trap of such writing, entertaining though it is, is that the setting becomes the story.
The book concerns the Cleve family, in particular Harriet Cleve Dufresne, a clever neglected child of Southern gentility on their uppers. Harriet's older brother, Robin, is found dead when Harriet is a baby, a blow from which Harriet's mother and her marriage never really recover. Harriet resolves to find the killer of her brother (although we never discover if his death is nothing more than a tragic accident) and the story takes us through the summer of her investigation and the consequences of this for a family of backwoods drug dealers, the Ratliffs.
And that's really all there is to it. If you enjoy reading meticulous descriptions of the houses of each of Harriet's many aunts, exchanges between Harriet and her devoted follower Hely, the bizarre family life of the Ratliff brothers and their permanently-on-the-edge-of-death grandmother, Gum, then this is the book for you. In my opinion, these kinds of pen portraits, undriven by the necessities of a plot, work best when they are refined and condensed, a la Carson McCullers for example. Otherwise, it can become a pointless ramble the reader has to wade through to get to the next event. This might matter less if all the description had some thematic point - to illustrate the huge social changes that were going on at that point in American history for example - but the town, Alexandria, and the Cleves exist in a vacuum, so the exquisite detail just become an end in itself.
In summary: well written, entertaining, but lacks edge and clarity through weak plotting and lack of thematic development.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great set of characters, 16 April 2006
Anyone that starts to read this book and isn't immediately swept up in the disastrous events that change this family's life forever, in the cloying atmosphere of small town America, and in the wonderfully descibed characters of Harriet, Robin, Aunt Edie and their family should probably not read any further, because this is the beauty of the book, and is its finest achivement - whipping up your interest and leaving you stranded in a hick town in a foreign country, entirely wrapped up in Harriet's world.
Tartt has created two families that are convincing in their relationships, and yet contain characters with distinct and defining characteristics. Each of the aunts has a clear personality and together they balance one another's strong wills. We learn about how they get along, and how they can be torn apart. Harriet is strong-willed and brutally honest, expecting the same honesty from those around her. She is confused by their white lies and small town logic, and that is exactly what causes so much destruction in the end.
The Ratcliff's are less easy to relate to and can seem cartoon-like with their drug-induced paranoia and thwarted efforts to turn their lives around. Evil Gum is so weak, calculated and destructive compared with Edie's strength and ingenuity, and poor Danny and Eugene are just as lost as Allison and Harriet. Both sets of siblings are struggling against events and forces that are beyong their control, and that's why we end up rooting for both sides as they collide into one another in such confusion.
I think this is a great novel, beautifully written in places, a little too long and a little self-indulgent in others. Sometimes Tartt drifts into descriptions of the surroundings that could either have been left out completely, or would have been better placed elsewhere, as they have a tendency to interrupt the drama. However, if you're looking to get involved in a place, time and characters that are realistic in their complexities and frustrating in their many faults, and if you're happy to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good read, this a great book for you.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Suberb, poingnant, scary, unputdownable, 29 Jul 2005
I loved The Secret History...but this is a tour de force in comparison. It's like "To Kill a Mockingbird" meeting "Lord of the Flies". You feel the sultry humid southern summer as if you're there sitting on the porch in Mississipi, you live being the 12-year-old girl trying to find herself, you smell the dust, the heat, the poverty, the fear, the violence, the decay, the love. I can't say more or I will spoil the ending, but this book is superb. Unmissable. Best book I've read this year or even this decade.
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