The Little Friend [L0086]

2003 - PB with minor wear. NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. • "Destined to become a special kind of classic." -The New York Times Book Review 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Donna Tartt's writing is in a league of its own. I stand in admiration of her deft skills and her writer's voice in this book. Donna Tartt is a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner. It pours from every paragraph in her literary accuracy of Southern language, nuance, priority, and characterization. I've read many a Southern writer (and I am a Southerner myself) yet I cannot think of anyone who delves down to the nitty-gritty in quite the same manner. It is more than her awareness of Southern parlance, what she handles adroitly is the underbelly of Southern mentality. She explores themes of denial, emotional isolation, class separation and self-righteous arrogance all through the vehicle of character. She writes with a brutal intensity. Her writing is so panoramic she holds the reader captive in describing a walk around the block. Donna Tartt is such a master storyteller, whatever she's selling, I'll buy."; " I'm putting The Little Friend in that Difficult-to-Get-Into club of mine called 'One of the Best Books I've Ever Read'. A caution to those who want a quick read, a tied-up-in-a-bow ending, or who aren't willing to get deep into a character and the character's milieu---if you are one of those, go with a John Grisham. The paper-back edition I read is a hefty 624-pages, and I savored every one of them."; "People may get the wrong idea when they read summaries, or the first few pages and anticipate some sort of murder mystery thrill. The death of Harriet's brother is merely background for her character. The skill with which Tartt explores the inner workings and thought processes of a virtually abandoned 12 year old girl whose older brother's murder has never been solved cannot be praised highly enough. Tartt seems to have magically leaped over that crevasse that separates us from our youth, and from understanding the mysterious social workings of 12 year olds. I found this book, though lengthy, to be absolutely riveting."; "One of the things that I found the most amazing was how well Tartt captured the time and place: the casual and cruel racism, the decaying town, the cadence and sound of the voices across the spectrum of social classes; and the thinking of the children: their fertile imaginations, their terrible decisions, the pains they must endure at the hands of the careless and unthinking adults who rule their worlds. "