The Secret History

Rating:
Summary: Vivid and entertaining.
Review: I read this about two months ago. It's a very long, somewhat haphazard book. I bought the edition with a Readers' Guide and browsed through it before I started reading the actual novel. I was very put off by the artists condescending manner to the interviewer and her trivialization of the issues that were brought up. I was so turned off, I almost didn't read it.

Donna Tartt is not the first writer full of herself.

But the woman can write. Two months later, the characters are still vivid. It's a wonderful story, a little Fitzgerald, a little Maugham and some Wilde, to boot. While there are glaring inconsistencies in the book and the end is somewhat unbelievable, I would recommend this book to anyone. I've heard a lot of people who believe that there should have been more focus and detail concerning the ritual itself, I didn't feel that was necessary--it would have merely detracted from story that the narrator felt was important.

Also read Matthew Pearl-The Dante Club and Arturo Reverte Perez--The Club Dumas.



Rating:
Summary: Boring, boring.
Review: This book was just far too long for the little it achieves. The characters all seemed two dimensional, the plot plodded along to the extent that I found it difficult to focus and concentrate and was always wondering if I was missing something.I kept asking myself why was D Tartt going into this much detail. And I couldn't believe one review I read that suggested that if you don't like the book then you're stupid. No, if you don't like the book it's just because you're too bored reading it to take it all in. I just wish I'd given up after a hundred pages of it instead of wasting so many more hours of my life, but I persisted because I hoped foolishly it would pick-up. I have to say the best thing about the book was the very attractive D Tartts photo inside the back cover. I would advise people to look at that and ignore the print!

Rating:
Summary: Absorbing, smart fiction
Review: Very well written. When I started reading this novel, I couldn't tear myself away from it.
I will not get much into the story itself here(you can find that in other reviews, and I don't want to throw in spoilers); but I'd like to highly recommend this to anyone who is a fan of literary, historical, or "scholarly" fiction. I personally loved Matthew Pearl's "The Dante Club", most of Umberto Eco's work, and am a huge fan of all of Margaret George's historical novels.
If you find yourself reading(and loving) books of that nature, then you will love this one as well.
This is the first book I've read of Tartt's, but I will be sure to read anything else of hers that I can find.