Rating: 
Summary: We've been hoodwinked.
Review: The Little Friend, the literary con game of the decade. I know why all the pictures and portraits of Donna Tartt have her looking straight ahead and unsmiling. If she were to part her lips, she'd probably burst out laughing and thinking that as Barnum said, There's One Born Every Minute. Shame on Knopf for not only perpetrating this crime, but for doing it willingly. Where is the editor who should have forced Ms. Tartt into writing an outline? Where is the editor who should have insisted on plot? Where is the editor who should have edited this pale excuse for an important novel and cut at least a hundred pages? The worse part of all this is that she shows moments of brilliance that make taking all the rest of this bad medicine even harder to swallow.
This is all a sham and unfortunately legions of readers were willing to be taken in. If Ms. Tartt spends another decade writing another book, I will have no trouble at all waiting. An inexcusable travesty.
Rating: 
Summary: beautiful writing hits a dead end
Review: this book has every element of classic southern goth minus the incest(although i don't know about those ratliff's)- there's racism, classicm, whiskey, white trash, a deep connection to the land, crumbling plantations, ghostly mothers and precocious little girls (read to kill a mockingbird, and the member of the wedding, it'll save you 300 odd pages of reading time). unfortunantly, it tries to sell itself off as a mystery novel, beginning with a young boy hung from a tree. who did it? we don't know. and i'm going to ruin it for you...WE NEVER FIND OUT!!!!!! I was unable to keep all of the aunts and whitetrash meth-makers straight until about 300 pages into the book. that's a bad sign. parts of it dragged, parts of it didn't, but i was so anxious to find out who killed robin (the boy who was hung) that i dutifully trudged along. 555 pages later- the book ends on a dumb joke with a thousand unanswered questions. and not the kind of questions that keep you pondering, but the ones that make you want to slam the book down and call up the author. her writing is beautiful, but i've read so much southern literature... i felt bored by the old cliches (true or not). compared to the fun i had reading the secret history... this book was one dull party... and it could have been soooooo good...there's so much promise in the pages. please donna, don't take another ten years to write the next one. the laboriousness of those years weighed down the pages of "the little friend". oh, and what's with the cool, creepy cover? anyone get the connection there?
Rating: 
Summary: Whodunnit?
Review: Laborious. Labored. Lightweight. Whodunnit indeed.Donna Tartt apparently didn't. The Donna Tartt I knew and admired was not in the room when this brick was written.Knopf should be ashamed. Stock characters in tired settings, cliches abounding, trite slapstick scenarios and not one (not one) iota of real emotions. Tin-earred, awkward and embarassing fake Southern dialogue and not one character (again, not one) to like or who stimulated anything other than a big fat yawn. Whoddunit? Why do any of these characters do what they do? Why doesn't anyone like anyone else or act human or even sensibly, even once? So many loose ends..but who really even cared at the end. Whodunnit? I'm afraid I'm guilty...I didn't use this to prop open the door instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't believe the diatribe!
Review: Obviously "The Little Friend" is a book that inspires either love, or hate. In my opinion, this book SINGS ... it offers hours of pure indulgence in beautiful prose, and is a 555 page-long insight into the human condition. I haven't been this sorry to finish a book in a long time. The fairest comparison I can think of for this book is with "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". "The Little Friend" is really that good, and that funny. The young heroine of the story is brash and unworldly, but brimfull of courage. Her chosen enemy is a moral shape-shifter. Nothing is black and white in this story, except people's skins. If you're looking for another "Secret History" you'll need to look elsewhere ... but in my opinion, Tartt's second offering leaves her first novel for dead. For example, didn't anyone else find the dialogue in "The Secret History", at best, unconvincing? The dialogue in this novel is absolutely delightful, and so smooooth. Thank you Donna!!
Rating: 
Summary: Long live Harriet!!!
Review: What a great tale. She really captures the essence of being a child in the summer in the south. And Harriet is a great character - fearless, moral, determined. I loved her, and I found it heartbreaking that her needs were so invisible to all the people in her life.
The snake stories, and there are quite a few in this book, seemed an amalgam of all those tales that southerners love to tell of near misses and tragic encounters with the feared, almost mythological, creatures.
While I don't require complete resolution in a novel's ending, I do wish that this wonderful book had a more coherent conclusion.
There were just to many things left unresolved.
But it is still a great story.
Rating:
Summary: oh for god's sake...
Review: It may be impossible for me to convey to you in words how much I hated this book (were you here, I would explain with an array of unpleasant facial expressions). In fact, I've never written an on-line review, but this book has provoked me to review-writing. Yes, I read The Secret History, but, to be honest, I remember very little of it, so I'm not one of those who is comparing the two. However, I will say that this book struck me as the work of a self-involved grad student badly in need of an editor, not the product of an accomplished author. The biggest problem? The dozen or so plot lines DROPPED with absolutely no resolution, or even any meaning. It would be one thing if it were simply that we never found out who killed Harriet's brother Robin. But, in addition, characters are introduced and set up to appear important, or at least to have pending story lines (Allison's mysterious dreams, allusions to Pemberton's possibly Knowing Something about Robin's death, LaSharon Odum's library habit and possible sexual abuse), but then disappear (or wander through inconsequentially)! Of course NOTHING to do with Harriet's future is resolved by the book's end. Will Harriet be tied to the Ratliffs? Will her family manage to repair itself in any way? Will Harriet find any reasons to rise from the depths of despair into which every circumstance of her life seems to have plunged her? That said, I would've cared more if not for the fact that, like every other character in the book, Harriet is completely unlikable. A more irritating collection of fictional characters, I have never come across. I kept waiting for someone to exhibit SOME redeeming quality, but, alas, it was not to be. No one shows any real love for anyone else. No one demonstrates any continuing loyalty to another human being. There is not a single character with whom I could imagine having any sort of pleasant interaction. Further, the trials and tribulations (ah, what an AMUSING name for the old family homestead) heaped upon Harriet, who is apparently a modern day(ish -- as many reviewers have asked, when the hell is the action in this book taking place?) Job, extend to a point where her situation would almost be comical, if it weren't so depressing --Maybe Tartt has written a black comedy, and the joke is on all of us for having failed to get it!. Hmmm...Let's make the little girl's family incapable of showing any affection, or even functioning. OK, that's not bad enough. Now, let's take away her mother figure, a maid who's been with the family for the girl's entire life, for some random reason. Wait, that's not dark enough! Now let's kill her favorite aunt, in a move that does nothing to further the (nominal) plot. Now let's make her best friend abandon her! Then let's make her think she has killed a man, then discover he was not the evildoer she believed him to be! And, finally, let's just abandon the entire story, leaving the girl hanging in the twilight terror of possibly being tied to a crime, of facing a return to her disfunctional and borderline abusive family... blah, blah, blah... Pretentious southern gothic mood music with absolutely no substance. Awful.
Rating:
Summary: A terrific disappointment
Review: I absolutely loved The Secret History and looked forward --for 10 years -- to reading Ms.Tartt's new novel. I live in Holland -where the book was first published, in Dutch, before the first English version was released. No wonder it was published here --the Dutch made her a super celebrity and there were lines and lines of people buying The Little Friend, and hoping for an autographed copy. So much HYPE ---over what??!!! I was so thoroughly disappointed in this book! Indeed a good editor could have cut it down by at least 60%. Beautiful prose to fill pages without going anywhere can be fine -- provided it IS indeed 'beautiful prose'. But Ms. Tartt's descriptions were endless, and pointless - irrelevant to the story, and having no added value - giving the read no food for thought, nothing poetic or lovely to take away. So irrelevant in fact that I found myself skipping along, not wanting to waste more time on this book. I stuck with it though, right to the very end and when i got there at long, long last and read those final words I yelled out loud "IS THAT IT?! THAT'S IT???!"
Rating:
Summary: not what I expected
Review: Next time I will wait and read the "real" reviews before I buy a book. This one was disappointing, and what can I say about the ending? Nothing good I assure you.
Rating:
Summary: Sucks the Big One
Review: The Little Friend is the worst book I have ever not finished. What on earth did Tartt think she was doing? TLF is like night to The Secret History's day. Did Tartt have a lobotomy sometime during the past decade? Maybe she's been too busy having a love affair with herself. Boring, boring, boring. She needs to take a class in novel structure and character development. To be avoided, even boycotted.
Rating:
Summary: Ugggg!
Review: I can not say how dissapointed I was with this book. I read The Secret History then The Little Friend right after. How dissapointed I was. The plot went on endlessly leaving me frustrated and very empty in the end. It felt like she ended the book half way through the last chapter. The slow painful build up and the subsequent fizzle of an ending seemed so pointless with so many unanswered questions I felt dizzy. I have very little time to read for pleasure and I feel as if that time was wasted. I will wait a little longer to do my reasearch before I spend the money on a newly released book again.
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