The Little Friend
author Donna Tartt returns with 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.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2016–2022years
50% recommend50% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Oh boy, you fucked up now. Here are the books I read this past year that I felt were "Good", starting from the most recent :
To Kill A Mocking Bird (Insanely good)
True Grit (Insanely good)
The Little Friend (Good)
Priceless (Very good, about art theft)
The Secret History (Insanely good)
Ready Player One (Good, nerdy)
Shadow Divers (Very good, history nerd book)
Diary of Anne Frank (Very good)
Unbroken (Very good, way better than the movie)
With The Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Very good)
Seveneves (good, but I'm a Stephenson fanboy)
The Martian (Very good, but just watch the movie).
I read a bunch of other stuff, but that's what I found really "good" this past year.
- I have been mildly disappointed by Tartt's follow-up works, but even more disappointed by her pace. Since TSH was published in 1992, she's written only two other novels:
* The Little Friend, in 2002, which is set in her native Mississippi; and
* The Goldfinch, in 2013, which won big prizes (including a Pulitzer), but is to my tastes inferior to the other two.
Her once-a-decade pattern suggests another book should be coming along any year now, but who can tell?
I mentioned uptopic that mystery writer Tana French included an homage to The Secret History in the second book of her "Dublin Murder Squad" series. It's worth reading, but I'm not sure how "like" Tartt it really is.
What makes French's series interesting is the shifting points of view within the same (fictional) Dublin bureau -- the first book is from the POV of a given character, and then the second shifts to someone who was a supporting character in the first book, and so forth.
