Rating: 
Summary: A superb book
Review: Beautiful writing: With a gutsy young heroine and her adoring sidekick, and with exceptionally realistic dialogue, the book is a terrific read. The racial overtones seem genuine and not overblown. As I was reading it, I couldn't help thinking what a great movie it would make.
Rating: 
Summary: Sadly, this is a disappointment
Review: I know all the Secret History fans don't want to hear this, but, this really is a mediocre book. I've waited so long for another Donna Tartt novel. Initially, the book seemed promising, but after 100 pages or so, it just fell apart. I suffered through the next 300 pages. The book finally picked up at the end, but it seemed like Ms. Tartt's desperate attempt to revive the lackluster previous chapters. Although the ending got a little exciting, it seemed to be written as an afterthought (and a way to justify Harriet's ability to hold her breath for so long!!). The descriptive writing is great, but it is just so overshadowed by the many unnecessary tangents to the main story (Allison's dreams, Harriet's aunt's death, the snake in the car incident, etc. etc.). I found myself disliking Harriet very much and I didn't find the myriad other characters interesting or compelling -- they were verging on irritating! If you are a true Secret History fan, skip this book - hopefully her next novel will be better!
Rating:
Summary: Fake Faulkner
Review: We all bought the book because we all loved The Secret History. At the tender age of 29 I'm suspicious of anything contemporary, but Tartt wrote a wonderful book once; if nothing else, I was curious of the follow-up.
It wasn't apparent from the start. It was only after a hundred pages or so, that I realised that before Tartt began to write The Little Friend, she had swallowed in large quantity, then digested, and then regurgitated most of rather well known books by William Faulkner. It doesn't matter that her style resembles nothing of The Snopes saga (no, of course it doesn't - her style is flat, listless; Faulkner's was brilliant, bold, poetic) it is the characters that sound strangely familiar. Did Tartt really think no-one would notice? But apparently no-one had.
Finally - did I really suffer over 500 pages for this?
Rating:
Summary: Channelling Tillie
Review: I am baffled by the negative reviews here! Sure it isn't as sexy and titilliating as SH, but this is a superb novel!This is an extraoridinary book, much richer, more refined, wiser, and more finely textured than SH. Two southern families. Oddly parrallel. One damaged by loss, disconnection, sleep, the other by guns, drugs, religion, and birth defects. The intersection is electric. It's all here, all kinds of gothic riches--dead animals as totems, deep resonant echoes of Faulker, Tillie Olsen, and Flannery O'Conner. All kinds of rich classical echoes, Alexandria and Memphis and a sleepy river. It's full of potent, elegant symbolism and reads like a big old-fashioned novel in many ways--nothing modern or even post modern here. Perfectly drawn characters, an understanding of delicate details of paranoia , and just plain old gorgeous writing. Attend to the diverseimages of water and tell me if her skill just doesn't blow you away. I felt as if I was in good hands from page one on--at the mercy of a writer who knows exactly what she is doing. I found it much more satisfying than SH. Her eye has sharpened, her sense of pace has improved, the details of the world she writes are observed with a wiser and more forgiving eye. ... You need to pay attention and read a bit more actively than was required by SH. Thank you for a TERRIFIC BOOK!
Rating: 
Summary: Simply Painful
Review: There must be a story between the covers of THE LITTLE FRIEND. Otherwise, how could one justify wasting 480 pages of perfectly good tree pulp? Still, I give up. I have been hovering somewhere around page 110 for the last three days and simply cannot stand to read another word. Tartt's sentences are beautifully constructed. Her love of language and unique ability to construct lyrical vignettes are immediately clear. Still, lovely descriptions do not make a book. The characters and setting, which Tartt describes in more detail than is warranted, are hackneyed: Southern family once grand but now in a state of elegant decay, spinster sisters, a sarcastic and precocious heroine, a mother so wracked with grief that she takes to her bed...You get the picture because you have seen it a thousand times before. And it is possible that she might have been able to pull it off had she not become so enamored of her own voice. It seems that Tartt has used the characters and (what she must believe to be a) plot as outlets for the thick descriptions she is so fond of. She would have done better, the text would have been more honest, if she had simply gathered together a collection of descriptions and then labeled them as such. Instead, she has woven them all together and called them a novel.
Rating:
Summary: Who Done It?
Review: Do you think we'll have to wait another decade to find out who did it? This isn't really an online review - another one wasn't necessary given the accuracy of 99% of the other reviews already provided by customers - it's just a plea for some information. When I skipped past about 350 pages to read the final chapter, it was to break the boredom and find closure to the suffocated plot. I was blown away when I didn't find it! Unbelievably, I actually had to backtrack and skim through the 350 page quagmire to find it, only to be disappointed again. I was about to poll some friends who I know are reading the book, but was too ashamed and afraid to admit that I missed something so obvious. Kudos to Amazon for printing so many reviews, they helped validate the disappointment....Looks like we need an Afterword from Donna Tartt to clear this up - but I can't hold my breath that long!
Rating: 
Summary: No mystery
Review: Donna Tartt's much-anticipated second novel is not a mystery, and I have no idea why this element of the story should be hyped over any other except that mysteries are very popular. "The Little Friend" is a classic Southern coming-of-age story. It is very well-written, with believable, enjoyable characters, credibly set in a small Mississippi town. There are echoes of fine Southern writers and even Jane Austen, although Tartt's voice is entirely her own. Shouldn't this be enough? Apparently not, and as a result "The Little Friend" is unsure whether it is supposed to be a coming of age story or a mystery. You've got to love the layering of the first sentence: "For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son's death because she decided to have Mother's Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it." Harriet Cleve Dufresnes wants to find out what happened to the brother whose Gothic death caused her family to unravel. Harriet and her friend Hely decide that Danny Ratliff (whose family has perhaps one complete set of teeth between them; they drive rattling trucks; they know guns, you know they type) was the culprit and they stalk him. This takes up precious little of the book and ends in an overwrought scene atop the town watertower. This is about the least interesting thing about "The Little Friend." It would have been more satisfying to put that energy into Harriet, her family, and how they function in their time and place in the world. I was not a fan of "The Secret History," which I felt was immature and so lacking in narrative focus that I forgot that there was supposed to be a mystery going on. Editors and reviewers seemed to be so blown away by Tartt's youth and beauty that they failed to do their jobs in helping her grapple with the novel's shortcomings. This novel has the same problem. Donna Tartt is a talented writer and this is an enjoyable book but it could have been much more than that.
Rating:
Summary: People get REAL! This IS NOT The Secret History
Review: And thank God for that!
I could not bring myself to finish reading the pretentious and boring TSH. But I devoured this book in the course of five days. I loved it. I think it's a great novel and it should be read for itself, not be unfairly compared with a book written over 10 years ago. Come on people! Grow up and get real.
Rating:
Summary: Harriet's Hauntings
Review: This novel may drag a little, but then, all books over 400 pages tend to.
It's very interesting on the point that this seems to be a study about a girl haunted. And how could she not be? Her family is a gallery of horrors and monsters and she seems to try to hold to a semblance of normalcy. Is that the reason people have to see her as a bizarre character?
Her mother is an emotional cripple, her father's a plain creep, her grandmother lives on another word, and so does her sister. Following the fascinating loops Tartt has designed, the horrifying consecuences of her acts prove that the "whodunit" motif is just wool pulled over the eyes. This novel is so much more than that!
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Story About Coming of Age
Review: This book was an excellent read: I really loved the way the main character (harriet) saw the worlds and how she had to grow up, even if she did not want to.
I think her life changed that summer and she had to face it, and Miz Tartt does it with a lot of grace and very touching situations. I don't know which book everyone has been reading, but man, this IS good!
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