The Secret History

Rating:
Summary: Amazing, enthralling... a must read!
Review: Tartt drowns you in a descriptive and flowing script that keeps you hooked until the end. The setting and plot are more than enough to keep you interested. Read this book!

Rating:
Summary: The Secret History a great book; disregard Kirkus review
Review: The Kirkus review prominently listed first is a disgrace. He/She is a complete and utter idiot! I wonder what this person has ever written...besides embarrassingly foolish reviews. The Secret History ranks as one of my favorite books and I would highly recommend it to anyone (with any taste that is). The suspense does not come from some trite Whodunnit plot, but from the spiralling progression of events that follow both murders. I eagerly await Tart's next novel.

Rating:
Summary: Great realationship and character development
Review: I've read it twice now. I love the way it romanticizes college life and then rips it apart. No mystery really, you know from page one what happened, just not how it came to be. I loved the first person narrative of Richard. Made me feel like a guy or something. I read somewhere it took her 7 years to write it. Wish she'd write another...

Rating:
Summary: One of my all time faves...
Review: The kind of book you can't recommend to everybody, (although I have recommended it to many). VERY strange happenings. A great story!

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent soap opera
Review: I have read this book about 10 times. It has this strange hold on me whenever I pick it up so that I must read the entire thing. Such a very interesting plot, characters everyone can relate to. It's a bit like a really good soap opera for smart people. This is one of the books that as you read it, you can see the movie that it should become playing in your head. I recommend it to everyone I know. But why hasn't Ms. Tartt written another book?

Rating:
Summary: This book will really keep you interested!
Review: I felt the novel A Secret History was great! I enjoyed the many events in the novel and could relate to the small college atmosphere. The book definately keeps the reader interested throughout and has a surprise ending that I could not believe. After reading this book for my Classics class, the Classics were much more fun to look at. Have a great time reading!

Rating:
Summary: Suspenseful and enlightening!!!!!
Review: This book took me a while to get into, but once I actually sat down and starting reading it hardcore , I got hooked. We had to read it for a class, which I was not too thrilled about but now I am thanking Professor Chell personally for letting us read such an engrossing novel. The ending was a total surprise to me and the whole tone of the book kept me intrigued. I've already requested others to read my copy and I am sure I won't get the book back for a while!!

Rating:
Summary: She ain't no Brett Easton Ellis -- she's better
Review: I agree with the glowing reviews here and I won't repeat them. I would only add that The Secret History is much more than a Brat Pack novel. Its pedigree has more to do with Crime and Punishment and The Great Gatsby than with the the poor-little-rich-kid, aren't-we-decadent whinings of McInerney, Ellis et al. It's much more vicious and, in the end, more compassionate. The (relatively) detached perspective of Richard Papen's "everyman" lets us see through the group's Town and Country lifestyle, and the satire of Bunny's funeral is satisfyingly nasty. In fact, Bunny's whole character is outrageously funny in a way that no Brat Pack brat could hope to be. At the same time Richard is seduced by the group, and so are we. It is this mix of disgust and awe that makes the group's downfall more poignant, and yet also a sort of redemption. Unlike Ellis, Tartt gives us a reason to care about her characters, and that makes for a better read and a much more important book.

Rating:
Summary: A richly rewarding thriller to shake your conscience
Review: My copy of The Secret History is deservedly worn. Its pages have been gripped so hard and turned so violently that it is a little the worst for wear. I loved Tartt's keenly animated tale of an enigmatic group of adolescent college students, submersed in the classical traditions of Greek philosophers and brought firmly up to date by a vicious and unprecedented murder. Tartt's book constantly sent shivers through any moral backbone I thought I had and by the end had erode any sense of concrete ethics I hoped might exist. A book which treats you as roughly as you should treat it!

Rating:
Summary: luxe thriller may not be so brainy - but is this the point?
Review: Within the first few pages, Tartt has protagonist Richard say it all - the motivating force here is a certain weakness for the picturesque. And if you also have one, then you too are Tartt's creature, and this is your book. Sometimes castigated for not being the intellectual contender press people like to say it is, the Secret History is nonetheless compelling, and awfully hypnotic. Its obsessive characters (who aim, perhaps with irony, but nonetheless w/ clear intent, to shack up someplace stately and "study the twleve great civilizations"), its confined spaces, its atmosphere of preordained and yet still dangerously haphazard events, compose into something haunting, and eerily beautiful. Also, Tartt's attempt to invest the book with the shadowed presence of another culture - that of ancient greece - has its effect. She manages to get a whiff of the exotic and austere on the air and, if it's not the language lesson some might be wanting, so much the better. Essentially, Tartt is writing the college novel few have the courage to write anymore - not one that's smug, or banal, but one that tackles directly the soul of those years, and that ardent, fierce desire to remake the self. Henry, Charles, Camilla and Francis may merely be sporting around in the New England night, drunk and in bedsheets, but for a brief second they spot the divine. It allows for consequences of character that more "realistic" maundering could not accomplish, and it leads to far more than a novel focused on frat hazing and youthful aimlessness could ever do.