Book Review: The Little Friend

From Goodreads: Bestselling 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.

Thoughts: A couple of years ago, stuck on the couch with a broken leg, I read The Secret History. I really enjoyed, but knew it had been an intense read. That, coupled with the fact that The Little Friend was so big has put me off reading it. However, as part of my TBR Spring Clean Challenge, I picked it up and started. So much of what I loved about The Secret History was there - solid characters, wonderful descriptions, a building of suspense. Again, a dense, attention demanding read, but enjoyable, thought provoking. Tartt sets you down in the middle of a sweltering Mississippi town and takes you into the lives of two very different families. The Cleves - a dysfunctional middle class family of some standing in the town; a family which has never recovered from the suspicious death of Robin a the age of 9. The Ratliffs - a family of four poverty stricken, drug addled brothers and their grandma. You can smell the different houses, see the different people as you read. The story slowly brings parts these two families together as Harriet spends her summer trying to solve the murder of her brother over 10 years ago.
I loved the writing. Tartt is a vivid story teller but (and it's a big but) the story just stops! Nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing - is resolved at the end! While I also detest books where everything is tied up in a neat bow at the end, this type of ending is equally frustrating. It truly felt like she had a word limit, she reached it and stopped. Not quite mid sentence, but it may as well have been!  I actually checked to see if there were pages missing.
Maybe it's me - maybe I'm the one missing something, but to say I was disappointed by the end of this is a major understatement. I felt betrayed (the book is 555 pages of small type) and abandoned. I'd formed an attachment to Harriet and her struggle. I needed to know she would be ok, but there is nothing to hold onto. Nothing to give you hope, nothing to suggest that the summer changes any thing at all for her or the Ratliffs. Disappointing.

The Secret History

Title: The Secret History
Author: Donna Tartt
Genre: Fiction
Audience: Adult
Format: Book - library

From Goodreads: Richard Papen arrived at Hampden College in New England and was quickly seduced by an elite group of five students, all Greek scholars, all worldly, self-assured, and, at first glance, all highly unapproachable. As Richard is drawn into their inner circle, he learns a terrifying secret that binds them to one another...a secret about an incident in the woods in the dead of night where an ancient rite was brought to brutal life...and led to a gruesome death. And that was just the beginning
   
What I thought: Last year I read a book called Reading By Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life by Brenda Walker about how the author used books to help her through cancer treatment. One of the books she mentioned that caught my attention was Donna Tartt's The Secret History. I can't remember exactly what she said about it, but it was enough for me to get the library to order it for me...and I'm glad I did.
Let me first say, it's a dense book. At over 500 pages long and small type, you have to read it. Set, I would say, in the late 60's, early 70's, there is a feeling of the Greek scholars being set apart from the rest of their class mates who are portrayed as seeing collage as one long party. Where Richard and his friends study the classics,  drink whiskey, eat out and pop prescription medication, their class mates party, drink beer, eat in the college dining hall and smoke dope. A very deliberate attempt by the author I feel to separate the Greek scholars - not so much as set them above, but set them apart. The events that happen are both fantastical and believable. The fall out devastating and inevitable. By the end of the book however, I did not like a single one of the characters. Flaws are one thing, but truly by the end I had trouble coming up with one redeeming feature between them let alone each!
Although it required concentration to read, The Secret History kept you engaged and wanting to continue. I often found I had to stop, not because I wanted to, but because I needed to absorb what had happened so far.
I would highly recommend The Secret History. I have another of hers sitting on a shelf upstairs (The Little Friend I think) which I am now sure to read. Just don't pick up The Secret History thinking you are in for  a light read!