the little friend
by donna tartt
★★☆☆☆
dates read: 11/8/22 - 11/18/22 ! this review contains spoilers !
"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."
tw: animal abuse/cruelty, child death, drug abuse, gun violence
if i had to describe this book in one word it would be: tedious.
the little friend is excruciatingly tedious. the whole entire first half of the book could have been ripped from the binding and the plot would have remained the exact same. i probably would've enjoyed it more if anything.
while i typically enjoy three dimensional characters and can appreciate solid characterization, tartt does too much. but its not only for her characters, she does too much when it comes to providing context on just about everything, the setting, the characters' thoughts, the histories, etc. the one thing that she spends too little time on is progressing the actual plot of uncovering robin's murderer. for majority of the book things felt very stagnant. despite me turning pages i wasn't really going anywhere. by the time i was halfway finished through the book, there was still nothing happening and by the time things started to pick pace near the end, i was no longer interested in how the story played out. i was more invested in just finishing the damn thing.
the protagonist of the little friend is harriet. a lot of her personality stems from her being a child, illustrated through her innate curiosity and recklessness. i actually found the childlike traits of her character to be more endearing if anything. she embodies the innocence of children that have them believing that they are invincible which is why she's often going through with bad idea after bad idea. the only thing that i didn't like about her was that she constantly proved to be a terrible friend. perhaps its to display the selfishness and naivety that correlates with her youth, but at the same time i remember being her age and absolutely cherishing my friendships with others.
now what i will say is that the little friend is a good representation of generational trauma, racial power imbalances, the desperation for closure that doesn’t exist, and the intricate characters (even though it was too much at times). getting to see the way that the characters of different ages interacted with one another was one of the best parts of the book. although the little friend is not very dialogue heavy, i started to flip through the pages in order to find out where the next verbal interaction would occur. the relationship dynamic
between harriet and ida rhew was probably my favorite to read. it's complicated power dynamic, with a 12 year old white girl, harriet, being of a higher status than an elderly black woman. due to her age, harriet doesn't understand that her comments about ida actually carry a tremendous amount of weight which eventually plays out in ways that harriet didn't ultimately want.
sometimes an ending can save a book, but not for the little friend. it had to be one of the least satisfactory endings to a book i've ever read. with that being said, i can understand that tartt decided to go forward with an ambiguous ending as a lesson on navigating grief and how closure is not guaranteed, despite the heartache and the desperation. however, reading a drawn out 600 paged book only to be left with no resolution, is frustrating. unfortunately i'm not capable of prioritizing the symbolism of the ending over the time i lost reading this book.
overall, i wouldn’t recommend this book to anybody but i can acknowledge the time and effort than went into cultivating a deeply fleshed out story. tartt is a beautiful writer, but a little bit too over the top at times.