The Little Friend

Review

This is definitely my least favorite Donna Tartt novel. First off, some things I loved: - the atmospherics of small-town Mississippi in the early 70s—snakes, heat, Bible study, meth, the works. - Harriet's perspective (so relatable to me as a former bookish, analytical, awkward kid with a weakness for assuming I knew better than everyone else) - the deep, sympathetic characters. I especially loved Edie, the matriarch with a will of iron who is unwilling to see or incapable of seeing the many ways in which her lack of empathy hurts those around her, and the whole Ratliff family, whose cruelties to one another I often found heartbreaking. - the portrayal of how grief can seep into every person in a family in different, and often contradictory, ways. The main thing I didn't like about it was that I found it overwrought and a little aimless. The descriptions of, well, everything, tend to wander. From the way that crape myrtle grows on a trellis to Harriet's processing of the departure of her beloved nanny Ida to the many, many reminiscences of the family's old mansion, the narration observes everything in painstaking detail, without ever quite deciding *why* it's doing so. The decision to center the plot around Harriet and Hely means that the reader is tied to the logical leaps and jumps of children, which, for me, takes away some of the sense of momentum of the story. After the first few pages, which so poignantly and terrifyingly set up the central emotional hook of Robin's death, the story bogs down in a seemingly endless maelstrom of familial grief and neglect. The character studies, beautiful as they are, weren't enough for me to feel engaged in the story, and by the end, I felt like I was slogging through. MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT—Read below at your own risk: ********* ********* I also can't decide how I feel about the most impactful plot decision in the book—not to reveal Robin's killer. On the one hand, I understand the symbolic effect. We don't often get clean resolutions to the stories of our grief. On the other hand, I hated it, as a reader, and from a plot perspective, I thought it really contributed to the lack of direction in the second half of the story.