- Paperback: 624 pages
- Publisher: Random House Inc. (31 Oct 2003)
- Language Spanish
- ISBN-10: 140003373X
- ISBN-13: 978-1400033737
- Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 2.8 x 17.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,912,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Ten years in the writing, it can hardly be said that The Little Friend, Donna Tartt's second novel and the follow-up to her phenomenally successful and assured debut The Secret History, was rushed out. But was it worth the wait? Write about what you know is an old adage and much of the appeal of her first book was that its sense of place--an exclusive New England campus was clearly and so adroitly drawn from intimate experience. Here, the Mississippi-born Tartt utilises, piercingly on occasions, the American landscape of her own childhood.
The Cleves--Charlotte, Grandma Edith, Great Aunt Adelaide, Aunts Libby and Tat--are a southern family of noble stock but, by the early 1970s, diminished numbers and wealth; haunted by the motiveless, unsolved murder of 9-year-old Robin, "their dear little Robs", a decade earlier. (The novel opens, a la Bunny's corpse in The Secret History, with his body found hanging from a black-tupelo tree in the garden: "the toes of his limp tennis shoes dangled six inches above the grass.") Harriet, Charlotte's youngest child, "neither sweet nor pretty" like her sister, Allison, but "smart" was a baby when Robin died. Now a precocious, bookish pre-teen, she is convinced she can unravel the mystery of his death. Her chief suspects are the Ratliffs, a local clan of speed-dealing ne'er-do-wells, one of whom, Danny, had been in Robin's class. (The Ratliffs own sorry histories, and in particular the corrosive influence of matriarch Gum, are tidily juxtaposed throughout the book with the varying fortunes of the Cleves.) Harriet enlists Hely, her willing schoolyard disciple, to help investigate.
For a while the novel takes on a positively Nancy Drew-esque hue; Harriet and Hely the spies, sneaking into buildings, making off with poisonous snakes and escaping from drug-addled trailer trash on bicycles. In a significant departure from The Secret History though, Tartt does not seem unduly concerned about plot and, or, pacing. She's interested in characterisation and the bickering aunts and so many of the minor characters, the odious car dealer Mr Dial, for example, "all rectitude and pickiness, sweet moral outrage itself", are realised wonderfully. This isn't to say it's not well plotted; it is, as the dénouement eventually reveals, but it is rather languid and things can get a bit soggy midway. (Overuse of the adjective "stolidly", a word that unavoidably, if quite erroneously, calls to mind heavy fruitcake, doesn't really help either.) Tartt's Southern Gothic saga may lack the page-turning thrill of her last novel but it's, ultimately, a no less impressive or rewarding work of fiction. --Travis Elborough --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
New Books Magazine Issue 13
"deeply absorbing and breathlessly exciting as Ms Tartt once again faultlessly explores a time, a place and a murder."
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
93 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Alternates between gripping and slow,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Little Friend (Hardcover)
The Little Friend is Donna Tartt's long awaited second novel after The Secret History. Though it shares a dense prose style with the earlier book, it is quite different in atmosphere and setting. A twelve year old girl, Harriet, spends a summer in the 1970s trying to find out who killed her brother Robin 12 years before. She has her own ideas about who is reponsible and with her friend Hely she sets about proving her suspicions. But what starts out as a fairly simple idea becomes ever more complicated, due to the large intertwining cast of characters around Harriet. She finds herself buffeted about by the adults around her. This is no simple whodunnit. It is a book about moving from childhood innocence towards maturity and adulthood, something Harriet has been dreading as she looks on her approaching puberty with horror. It is also a book about morality, and actions and consequences. But perhaps more than anything it is a book about family, an old southern family torn apart by the grief that still haunts them twelve years after the death of their golden child. They are living in the era after the civil rights movement, when people have had to adapt to new ways of living, and yet the traditional racism is still evident in the relationships between the book's family and their black housekeepers, which Harriet witnesses in shame and anger.The pacing of this book is up and down. Gripping at times, but slow in other places due to long dense sections of description, sometimes beautifully written, other times wearing and dull. The last hundred pages or so are hard to put down, and there are a number of tense, dramatic and somtimes darkly humorous scenes right through the book. The character of Harriet is extremely well drawn, and sympathetic, as is her friend Hely and the Ratliff family. Is The Little Friend as good as The Secret History? It lacks the first book's focus. As a novel centred on a young southern girl and a murder it also doesn't live up to Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. But it is nevertheless a good novel, painted on a wider and more ambitious canvas than the first book.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Biggest Disappointment of my Life,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Little Friend (Hardcover)
Having relished every page of The Secret History, it was a painful 10 year wait for Tartt's follow up. Having got hold of my copy on the day of its release, I prepared to "enter in to the sublime". If only.Tartt's sun bleached southern landscape, and unengaging characters were in such stark contract to the freshness and originality of her debut novel, I struggled to believe I was reading the same author. From the farcical redneck "bad guys", to the black stereotypes and wet family members, there seemed to be no single character in this entire story whom I wanted to know any better. While the length of the Secret History made it like spending a long weekend with a dear friend, the Little Friend was more like a dull house guest who had overstayed its welcome. I couldn't find any strand of this story line interesting enough to cling too as I waded through it. While the quality of Tartt's prose is still a pleasure to read, it wasn't enough to bring life to this otherwise crashing bore of story. If your curiosity really does get the better of you, please don't pay full price for this book. You'll regret it.
45 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books of the year,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Little Friend (Hardcover)
Donna Tartt obviously faced a potentially difficult task living up to the expectations generated for her second book by the success of the first - the astonishing Secret History - and the ten year wait only heightened the hype, and the potential fall. However, she has once again delivered a quietly stunning read.This time, rather than the rarefied elegance of Hampden College, and the beautiful but alien setting of Vermont, she chooses the more familiar fictional landscape of the South - the gothic, Faulkner-esque South - as a backdrop, and the elements of the plot are appropriately dark - the decaying family, the shadows cast by a tragic death. But, while elements in the novel are familiar and carry echoes of literary heritage, the story is never predictable (inevitable, possibly; but predictable, no) and her writing is neither pretentious, portentous, nor dull. There are of course parallels that can be drawn with The Secret History - the hero/heroine as outsider, the wildness and rage lurking just below a civilised veneer - but as this is obviously destined for many a Lit. class and companion study notes let's leave the detailed analysis for now. I started this - and it is a huge tome, with surprisingly small print - late at night, intending just to read a few pages, and several chapters later was still glued to it. Her ear for dialogue and ability to sketch the off-beat quirks of day-to-day existence round the margins of a gripping story is still as strong as ever. Absolutely unmissable: bound to become a classic.
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