Rating: 
Summary: banal
Review: It is very difficult to understand the enthusiasm this novel has generated. One can see what Ms. Tartt is trying to do here, but it is all a huge, unconvincing, cliche-ridden stretch. The main characters are suffocatingly self-absorbed, the theme amoral, the approach irritatingly mannered, and the snobbishness excruciating.
Rating: 
Summary: Overwhelmingly pretentious but engaging nonetheless...
Review: Despite myself, I found "The Secret History" very engaging. The plot was unique and intriguing. And the novel was very "atmospheric".Tartt's blatant attempt to write like an 18th centure novelist was cloying. Her use of stilted , early-20th century lingo ("old chap"?) was annoying. The novel takes place in the 1980s, so why use dialogue that sounds like it came straight out of "The Great Gatsby" (regardless of the desperate "Gatsby" allusions thoughout the book)? The characters are not only under-developed, but preciously unbelievable. Do you know any college students who take baths instead of showers? And who wear suits and ties at all times? And who are constantly eating lamb chops? Please! And the Classics Professor Julian? I find it highly unbelievable that any college or university would tolerate his little "school within the school". I'm not sure if I was supposed to be sympathetic or attracted to the main characters in this novel. I think Tartt was trying to create a group of "outsiders". I found the main characters to be repugnant. Their arrogance, hypocrisy, and sense of entitlement were very unappealing. Being rich and condescending does not make one an outsider, just hard to like. Tartt seems to shy away from discussing seemingly important events in the book, like the twins' sexual relationships, the events and experiecnes at the bachanal, the relationship between Henry and Camille, or the murders. Then she provides over-dramatic, almost adolescent descriptions of banal events and emotions common to most college students. More than once, I found myself literally rolling my eyes while reading some of these passages. Each time Tartt quotes texts in another language, she feels the need to translate the text for us. Although many readers probably don't read ancient Greek, we also don't need every word of French or Latin translated for us, particularly when the quoted phrase is something as obvious as "amor vincit omnia". My recommendation would be: Purchase and read this novel. It's *mostly* enjoyable. But don't believe the hype. This is not the novel of a mature writer. Not by a long shot.
Rating: 
Summary: Smart but Dark - a hard-to-put-down kind of story
Review: This book is smart on so many levels - endless quoting of Latin and Greek, on literature generally and as a story about smart classics students doing incredibly naive things. The story starts as a whydunnit - the murder is on the first few pages - and seemingly committed with little effort or thought - and then the reasons slowly unwind through the book. At the half way point the reasons are clear why the murder was committed - and yet the whole book seems to take on an even more complex nature and you realise that murder is more than the simple why's and wherefores - but there is a profound weakness in humanity - that is that murder is so extreme - how does it really affect the psyche? Told in the first person from the perspective of Richard - a kind of chameleon - who adapts himself to life in a rather exclusive East Coast University and inveigles his way into the Classics lectures which are attended by a small but even more exclusive group. Julian the lecturer, Henry - the ring leader, Francis - gay, Bunny the East Coast sponger, and the twins Camilla and Charles. The book centres mostly around them and their slowly disintegrating world. Tartt is so good at writing descriptively that the college and environs comes alive - in fact any scene seems effortlessly painted. Although it was over 500 pages long I found it a difficult novel to put down - it flowed so easily along. The story was compelling - but it was also so beautifully constructed. I am looking forward to reading her next book "The Little Friend" when it arrives.
Rating:
Summary: Can't stop reading it!
Review: I read this book because I saw a recommendation of this author in Anne Rice website, my favourite writter, and i thought i could give it a try. I have enjoyed reading it a lot, it is one of the few books that I could take out of my mind and the only solution was to continue reading it. It does not happen very often, the last time was when i read A Simple Plan by Scott Smith, which is another amazing thriller. The great achievement of this book is that you feel identified with the narrator, and step by step of his story you can't stop thinking that you would have done exactly the same as him. I hope they can make a good movie of it!
Rating:
Summary: Slick Secrets
Review: For a first novel, "The Secret History" is impressive. It's a highly entertaining murder/mystery that rarely falters during the first half of the book. However, my main problem is that the protagonist, Richard, never outgrows his hero-worship of his friends. There is a troubling air about the novel that suggests we SHOULD worship those who are gifted with wealth, beauty, and intelligence, rather than question more deeply what it is to forge your own identity apart from traditional/societal identifiers of power. This is what I thought Richard's journey would be: to define himself apart from his friends. By the end of the novel, if anything, he emulates their tragedy in what resembles Victorian melodrama rather than any Classical sensibility. It could have been a better novel had the author understood a 20th century location and tried to play upon a movement of ancient and contemporary ideas using Richard as a vehicle. (Think Coetzee in "Disgrace": the movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism) Instead, Tartt's novel results in a slightly banal mixture of two sensibilities that never plunges deeply into history and myth but tempts us with its superficial symbols. (I cringe at the thought of young fans tucking Mont Blanc pens into their jacket pockets but this is what the novel tries to teach its readers to do: imitate "sophistication" without developing it.) However, if you want a fun, glitzy read, this is far better than any Mary Higgins Clark mystery. Just don't look to deeply or you'll be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Trust Me
Review: Trust me. I will not drone on with 900 words about why this book is the best work by a living author I've read in years, but just believe me that it is. It is superiour in every single way imaginable to any recently published book you read last year, or will read next year or, probably, will read in the next ten years. There are a few very simple reasons why this book recieved any criticism at all. 1) The first and primary reason, in my opinion, is jealousy. With the possible exception of Milan Kundera, Donna Tartt is not only a better writer than any living human being - she is infinitely better, she is exponentially better, and, yes, it appears she knows it. 2) People love to make a name for themselves by trying to bring down a person around whom there has been a certain amount of hype. 3) Some people are just good old-fashioned stupid. Lets put it this way: If you don't realize that this is better than the vast majority of fiction being published today, the deficiency is on your end, not the author's. Any reviewers taking a condescending "Well, it was good for a debut" tone should also put a lid on it: You know you couldn't do this yourself if you were locked in a room with a typewriter for the rest of your life. Please, be fair and be honest. I enjoyed "The Little Friend" even more. As a reader, I'm very thankful that Donna Tartt is writing fiction.
Rating:
Summary: A MUST READ!!
Review: I bought this book because a friend suggested it, who was right about reading it.
There is so much I would like to say about this book, in the first few chapters I found it quite slow and boring but then the story caught up I couldn't put the book down. It's incredibly suspenseful till the very last page, just when you think you got it all another thing comes up. I was mostly drawn by Richard (the protagonist) and Camilla one of the twins.
For those who haven't read it I don't want to spoil it for them .... in other words it's a challenging combination of mystery, bizarre and a classic.
Rating:
Summary: Great psychological suspense
Review: There is so much I would like to say about this book, but don't want to join the ranks of unthinking people who submit spoilers. At first it was slow going, because I found the students to be unlikeable and arrogant. Then I got caught up in the story and just couldn't put it down. The writing is really, really, good. It was surprisingly clean by today's standards--things were implied rather than described, mercifully. It was incredibly suspenseful. Just when you think everything is resolved, and you wonder why you are still holding 200 unread pages, then something else is revealed. My criticisms are very minor. For one thing, I don't think Bunny belonged in the group, given his total lack of academic accomplishment and ambition. That is all I will say because I hope you will read it, and I don't want to ruin anything. I am going to take a few days to mull over this book, then I am going to start the author's newest one.
Rating: 
Summary: Why so much hype?
Review: I bought this book because I read in Newsweek that it had a cult following. The cover of the book quotes reviews saying it is "impossible to leave alone until I finished" and that "the pages beg to be turned." Unfortunately, I didn't find it to be so exciting. The prologue reveals that the Hampden College students in the book will kill a fellow student named Bunny. Then, Richard Papen, the narrator, begins the story telling how he got to Hampden and how became one of the group of students studying Greek exclusively under a professor named Julian Morrow. The story of how the murder occurred and what happened in its aftermath unfolds. The narrator presents the turns and twists of the story unemotionally so that the driving force of the book is more the weirdness of the relationships that have developed between the students than it is actual events. I never felt emotionally attached to the characters, connected to any guilt they may have felt, or concerned about their fates. I experienced the novel with a complacency that allowed me to "leave [it] alone" numerous times. I will say that the narrator describes the New England surroundings and the college's atmosphere with a vividness. The word choices are more lyrical and intellectual than your typical pop-culture book. Despite this, I feel the writing style was less challenging than _Harper's Magazine_. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, but if you're interested in it, I suggest you read it for yourself to see if you agree with me.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning prologue, great book.
Review: The prologue of Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" is the best thing about it. It jumps you right into the center of the mystery plot, giving you the basic information that a group of friends has killed one of its own to protect a secret, and it leaves you feeling almost as haunted as the narrator, Richard Papen, feels. The suspense in this novel comes, though, from wondering not who did it but why. Jumping then to the beginning of the story, Richard begins to explain how he started taking Latin classes on his campus and how those classes introduced him into an odd clique of friends, all obsessed with their studies, all snobbishly superior to everyone else on campus. But something's amiss with this group of friends, for they share a lot of secrets. And one of the friends, Bunny, is threatening to confess them all. And so we learn with Richard the basics of the mystery. The book is well-written and compelling, and Tartt, who took 10 years to write a follow-up novel, became a bit of a legend for a time. Coming out of nowhere, her debut novel garnered tremendous, earned buzz and became a bestseller. A friend of mine once told me this book made him want to write again. For me, it kept me up nights and proved to be a rather fulfilling tale. I recommend it highly.
| 
