Donna Tartt

The second novel by Donna Tartt,  bestselling author of “The Goldfinch” (winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize), “The Little Friend” is 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. 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 enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.

The Little Friend

Harriet Cleve ha dodici anni e una vita vissuta sotto il segno di una tragedia di cui non ha memoria: quando era solo una neonata, suo fratello Robin è stato impiccato a un albero del giardino, ma il delitto che ha sconvolto l'esistenza della sua famiglia è rimasto insoluto. Giunta alla soglia dell'adolescenza, la ragazzina decide di sciogliere il mistero che avvolge la morte del fratello, scoprire l'assassino e ottenere finalmente vendetta. Un romanzo ricco di suspense in cui è difficile distinguere il vero dal falso, il colpevole dalla vittima, e che trascina il lettore negli abissi della fragilità umana.

Il piccolo amico

Valeria Giuliani

The sunlit rails gleamed like dark mercury, arteries branching out silver from the switch points; the old telegraph poles were shaggy with kudzu and Virginia creeper and, above them, rose the water tower, its surface all washed out by the sun. Harriet, cautiously, stepped towards it in the weedy clearing. Around and around it she walked, around the rusted metal legs. One day is never, ever discussed by the Cleve family. The day that nine-year-old Robin was found hanging by the neck from a tree in their front garden. Twelve years later the family are no nearer to uncovering the truth of what happened to him. Inspired by Houdini and Robert Louis Stevenson, twelve-year-old Harriet sets out to find her brother's murderer – and punish him. But what starts out as a child's game soon becomes a dangerous journey into the menacing underworld of a small Mississippi town.

ame 

I had to DNF this at 30 pages in...not my proudest reading moment. But this book felt so dense and heavy and dragging. Plus, after reading some other reviews, it's never revealed who killed Robin. So I'm glad I didn't waste my time. 

Amanda

Thoroughly enjoyed Harriet's character and the ending of the book was executed so well. Not Tartt's best, but she never disappoints in forming the characters you fall in love with and relate to.

The little friend

esperanza 

4.5 

This book took me a while to read—not because it is hard; but it is slow. Instead, I wasn’t in the right headspace when I started it, then I had school, and I just never picked up the book due to being busy. I had forgotten a few characters, details, etc, but when picking up the book again…I was sucked back in. The Little Friend is my favorite Tartt novel, it exceeds The Secret Histoy and The Goldfinch tremendously.

Twelve-year-old Harriet is doing her best to grow up, which is not easy as her mother is permanently on medication, her father has silently moved to another city, and her serene sister rarely notices anything. All of them are still suffering from the shocking and mysterious death of her brother Robin twelve years earlier, and it seems to Harriet that the family may never recover. So, inspired by Captain Scott, Houdini, and Robert Louis Stevenson, she sets out with her only friend Hely to find Robin's murderer and punish him. But what starts out as a child's game soon becomes a dark and dangerous journey into the menacing underworld of a small Mississippi town.

Anja Hansen

~closer to 3.5/5~

This is my least favorite Donna Tartt novel. However, I still enjoyed it and think it gets a worse rep than it deserves. It's understandable that a lengthy read is not for everyone, but I think that if the writing is good it adds a lot to the characters. Which is crucial for a character-driven book such as this one, as opposed to a plot-driven book.
I will say that the story did not wrap up in an entirely satisfying way, but you know, it's the journey that matters 

Also I gotta add, this book oddly had a Stephen King-esque feel to it

Rohan Uddin

A great, long and exhausting book. The characters are well formed, and we take a glimpse (a very long glimpse) of Southern life in Mississippi. I believe it is all about grief and its effects. But the resolution was not satisfying. This is not The Secret History, but it will do.

Micah

This is not a murder mystery; I'm sorry the dust jacket lied to you. This is an excellent portrayal of children realizing their actions have permanent consequences and learning how to handle those consequences when confronted with them. This is also a great explanation of complicated family dynamics and how children are often left to the wayside because they're "too [insert adjective]" at times. This is not a murder mystery. This is a family-driven coming-of-age narrative.

Anna Brunner

Good, but my least favorite out of her three

Mary Rose Luksha

Tartt's lush and absorbing prose is the only thing keeping me from a 2 star review.

It's seems like she had two different books in mind when she began The Little Friend. The first 200 and some pages reads like a well-crafted, slow-paced but suspenseful murder mystery. The last 400 pages read like the heartbreak of being twelve and in between everything. Both of those stories would have been interesting to read. However, the dusk jacket leads the reader to believe it's one story, when really it's another. 

The first 200 pages are some of the best fiction writing I've ever read. I love the minute descriptions and memories. I love reading two different narrations of the same scene, getting inside different characters' heads. But the last 400 pages...? No momentum. Sure things happen, but they don't drive the characters forward. It's hard to explain how while there are major events, they are more like a sequence of things taking place, but don't serve the overarching storyline. 

And (view spoiler)[ that was the worst ending in the history of endings. Why Tartt didn't solve Robin's murder, I'll never know. And not only that, but the ending she chose was...impotent. Lifeless. Like she just didn't feel like writing any more, so she stopped. Even after everything that happened at the water tower, Harriet could have had some kind of closure with Danny, but there was nothing. And I get that an unsatisfying ending is "realistic" but no one wants to read a story that goes nowhere. Even nonfiction is written about interesting times in history, or people who affected change. I wanted Harriet to learn and grow, to realize something about herself - her pride or her stubbornness - and change because of it. And maybe she did change, but Tartt didn't bother to write about it.  (hide spoiler)]

In a nutshell - beautifully written; beautifully, INFURIATINGLY written.

Fraser Simons

This is probably at this point somewhat expectedly unconventional. Tartt doesn’t really seem interested in picking a lane and staying in it. I’m not sad about it.

Harriet, the daughter of a grief stricken mother in the south, has grown up to be a self-sufficient, determined kid that is beyond her years in maturity and brains. But, just like her mother and people who directly knew her murdered 9-year old brother—culprit unfound—she’s somewhat stuck in time in other ways. 

From the focal point of this unresolved trauma, Tartt launches an unusual coming-of-age story that mirrors Harriet’s ever changing interests and feelings toward life. When she is obsessed with solving the crime, which ranges in her mind, mostly in dreams, the story adopts mystery, crime aspects. When Harriett views the adults around her in insightful ways that she internalizes, there’s shades of To Kill A Mockingbird’s Scout (I think that’s the kid’s name?) qualities being annunciated. She’s scrappy, plays with boys, reads a lot, shaping her worldview from the stories she consumes. 

Because Atticus is not there. Her mother is physically present, but otherwise, a pale version of herself. There is a push-pull of tradition and entropy versus the inevitability of change in those that live. All else withers and ends in a kind of cage or prison of their own making in town. Harriett has to try and discern, essentially alone, who she wants to be - while understanding, simply by virtue of being “new” in her being a child, how not to end up like the adults around her. Their racist and prejudiced and stuck in their ways. rather than deal with everything hindering them, especially the grief of the community and those closest to her brother when he died, they continue to ineffectually harm everyone they know and love in often selfish and boorish ways; exemplifying and manifesting the absolute opposite of the values and virtues southerners give mouth service, but undermine with their own actions.

Add to that Tartt’s exceptional specificity and deftness at painting a scene and making a text so rich you fall into it, and you have a strange book that is more complex and in some ways better written than The Secret History. Especially love that the structure and form, as well as multiple genre bending that occurs, as Harriett sort of tries on these aspects of herself as the story progresses. It makes a lot of sense for a story about a child, especially one so concerned with fiction to construct her reality in the formative years of her life. Every character and location is vivid and often raw. 

It’s quite dark, but not so much always gothic in a southern way. More so in its treatment of the coming-of-age, loss of innocence, by way of every character we come upon and the ability to treat Harriett as someone who, come what may, will see the greyer shades within her black-and-white world despite her also wishing to return to a time when her mother was a mother and her brother was alive. Even as a child she is precariously close to being another adult trapped in a cycle that feeds their most horrible traits, constantly chasing their own tales and rutting in the mud.

Rebecca Bell

I had very high hopes for this one.  The Secret History is in my top 5 and I loved The Goldfinch.  This was a coming of age unlike any I had ever read before.  Raw and unapologetic.  Stunning in the ways that you are confronted with death as soon as you begin to grow.  I enjoyed Tartt’s writing, as always, and I loved the atmosphere she created.  However, I feel like it was left unfinished.  Once I had read the last paragraph, I sat and thought, well this can’t be the end?!  I wish it was all wrapped up in a nice little bow, but I suppose that’s the point of the book.  We will never know.  

Dans une petite ville du sud des États-Unis, Harriet Cleve Dufresnes grandit dans l'ombre d'un frère décédé, retrouvé pendu à un arbre du jardin. Un meurtre non élucidé qui a anéanti sa famille. 
Imprégnée de la littérature d'aventures de Stevenson, Kipling et Conan Doyle, Harriet décide, l'été de ses 12 ans, de trouver l'assassin et d'exercer sa vengeance. Avec, pour unique allié, son ami Hely. Mais ce que Harriet et Hely vont découvrir est bien éloigné de leurs jeux d'enfants : un monde inconnu et menaçant, le monde des adultes… 

Le petit copain

Sarah Escorsa

Ayant adoré "Le maître des illusions", le premier livre de Donna Tartt, je me suis précipitée sur celui-ci dès qu'il est sorti et là, quelle déception! C'est lent lent lent... J'ai eu beau faire un effort, je n'ai pas pu aller plus loin que la page 300 (le livre fait 600 pages). Dommage, car j'ai beaucoup aimé le personnage de Harriet, très attachant.

Kwan Ann Tan

The second novel by Donna Tartt, bestselling author of The Goldfinch (winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize), The Little Friend is 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. 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 enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.

A Novel

Lena 

TW: animal suffering and death 

The writing is exceptionall like always. The atmosphere similarly good. I dnf'ed this book because you repeatedly read about an animal suffering and dying. 


La determinación de una niña de doce años por llegar al fondo del crimen que se llevó a su hermano cuando ella era solo un bebé. La novela que demostró que Donna Tartt tenía mucho más que decir.

Desde siempre, los Cleve han tenido la sana costumbre de rememorar juntos la historia familiar. Todos hablan de todo, pero nadie se atreve a recordar aquella tarde de verano en que el pequeño Robin apareció ahorcado en un árbol del patio trasero de la casa. La sorpresa y el dolor trastornaron a la señora Cleve, que desde entonces deambula como un fantasma por las habitaciones sucias mientras el padre cura sus males en brazos de otras mujeres y la abuela saca fuerzas de flaqueza para dominar tanta locura.

Harriet, la hermana menor de Robin, era un bebé cuando tuvo lugar la desgracia, y ahora es una niña de doce años con las rodillas llenas de rasguños y el ánimo peleón de quien acaba de estrenarse en la vida. Solo ella parece preocuparse por averiguar el nombre del asesino, pero ¿será capaz de resolver un caso que la policía ya tenía archivado?

Muy lejos de la sensiblería y muy cerca de la gran literatura, Donna Tartt nos devuelve al tiempo de nuestra infancia con Un juego de niños, una novela tan hermosa como esas largas tardes de verano en que da lástima crecer.

Un juego de niños

Emir Andrés Ibañez

Una historia muy bien narrada y con momentos intensos e impactantes, pero lamentablemente le sobran 300 páginas.

Jade Flynn

2.5/5. The Secret History and The Goldfinch are two books that are dear to my heart. The Little Friend reads like a debut novel, it felt like Tartt was floundering, trying to find her footing as an author and fumbling for a story that wasn't quite there. It's frustrating because I know how good she is, I truly think she's a cut above the rest. There are bursts of brilliance in the language but nothing compared to the constant cadence of her other novels. She still stands as my all time favourite author. Read as part of my own July tome topple readathon.

Twelve year old Harriet is doing her best to grow up, which is not easy as her mother is permanently on medication, her father has silently moved to another city and her serene sister rarely notices anything. In a small Mississippi town, Harriet Cleve Dusfresnes grows up in the shadow of her brother, who--when she was only a baby--was found hanging dead from a black tupelo tree in their yard. His killer was never identified, nor has his family, in the years since, recovered from the tragedy. For Harriet, who has grown up largely unsupervised in a world of her own imagination, her brother is a link to a glorious past she has only heard stories about or glimpsed in photograph albums. Fiercely determined, precocious far beyond her 12 years and steeped in the adventurous literature of Stevenson, Kipling and Conan Doyle, she resolves, one summer, to solve the murder and exact her revenge. Harriet's sole ally in this quest, her friend Hely, is devoted to her, but what they soon encounter has nothing to do with child's play: it is dark, adult and all too menacing. A revelation of familial longing and sorrow, The Little Friend explores crime and punishment, as well as the hidden complications and consequences that hinder the pursuit of truth and justice.

Prashant Prasad

definitely not for people who love their endings tied up in a little bow

donna tartt’s prose is unparalleled

+ original story
+ great writing - the character’s psychology and the atmosphere
- the atmosphere too :dd it was so dark and gross and depressing, some parts made me feel physically sick with how bad people sum of the character’s were so i don’t reccomend reading it when u’r not all that stable or in a good place mentally :))
- unnecessary length - only in the last like 150 pages we get sum actual movement with the solving of the murder and until then it’s pretty bleak and vague, it’s all very descriptional of feelings which i personally doesn’t fit as well with the story always
- we also get a lot of talk of the future. as in ,,she won’t ever forget this moment until the rest of her life,, so it makes it seem like later in the book we’ll get to see some of the future too, but we sadly don’t. i’d love somw kind of an epilogue placed in f.e. 10 years after all the events to see what then actually happened
- the ending was just too rushed for me. we get like 400 pages just describing each day of the summer and the feelings and atmosphere but the ending was just so fast in comparison
- the description of the story made me so excited to read a dark but adventurous story where two children get in trouble for being bored one summer and attempting to solve an old murder. didn’t quite get that ://

Daryl Houston

This one was a really slow start for me, but as I got into it, there were times that I couldn't put it down. Although I'm on a kick this year to read authors who are not straight white men, I found myself thinking there was something very masculine about the prose in this book. I haven't yet teased out what made me think that. In the end, the book didn't rock my world, but I thought a lot what Tartt wrote about the Ratliffs rang pretty true (I loved the "I'm on do such and such" style speech, though I'm a little embarrassed that it echoes my own), and I found Harriet's character well done. I liked some of the family history, though I feel like a fair bit must have been edited out (for example, given the way Allison was introduced, I thought there was precious little of her of any importance in the book, and I felt like there was an almost Faulknerian setup of the family in general that never quite paid off, though I suppose Faulkner had a dozen or so novels in which to trace the history of the Compsons, so let's give Tartt time or figure she simply doesn't want to linger with this southern family). I'm glad I read it, and having now read two of Tartt's novels, I'll go back and read her debut, which apparently made waves when it landed.

Jemima Scott

There were parts of the book I preferred more than others but overall, a solid read

The Little Friend

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