Rating: 
Summary: Good book
Review: I really enjoyed "The Little Friend." It's Southern Gothic at its best. Not much happens (until the melodramatic finale), but the characters and the sense of place are well captured. I laughed until I cried at the scene with the cobra (you'll have to read it for yourself--I'm not giving that one away!). Tartt has given us an detailed and accurate portrayal of what North Mississippi was like in the 70's. Imagine Proust filtered through Faulkner--that's the best way I can describe this memorable novel. I preferred it even to "The Secret History." Try it for yourself. I think you'll find the time and money well spent.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs an editor
Review: As someone who really liked The Secret History, I found this book a real let down - and I am NOT looking for "another" Secret History. This book is filled with too many Southern cliches and annoying characters. I'm not sure if we are supposed to care about Harriet. Frankly, I was hoping she'd drown in the watertower. For someone who is supposedly smart Harriett is profoundly stupid -- as are so many of the central characters -- and I don't care to read 750 pages about stupid people. It's also tinged with snobbery, racism and stereotyping, especially of African-Americans. The author should think twice about comparing herself (favorably) to Herman Melville and Dickens - except, of course, if she's talking only of sheer length. Maybe her novella will be better, it will certainly be shorter. Next.
Rating: 
Summary: Where's the Magic?
Review: I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new novel by Donna Tartt for ten years. I bought the Secret History the first week it was out and have since worn out three subsequent copies. I reread the book at least 4-6 times yearly and never fail to be entranced and drawn in by the intensity of the story and luminosity of the characters. It is therefore not surprising that anything less in a follow up book would be a dissapointment. The sad truth is that The Little Friend is mediocre at best. While not poorly written, it feels that Tartt is stetching to fill page after page with endless discription and her action scenes lack any vibrancy at all. The characters are dull, shallow portraits of people with little substance behind them, and it is difficult to maintain interest in them. Throughout the book I kept feeling like she was trying to lead up to a main point, but by the end of the book we still hadn't reached it. The ending was particularly dissapointing, because after reading 555 pages of overblown prose I expected at least some sort of closure. I actually thought perhaps someone had removed the last few pages of the book, as it ended so abruptly and leaving the story (to my mind at least) unfinished. The Little Friend felt contrived, and artifical, and I am dissapointed. I am glad I read it but I will not be rereading it. If nothing else, at least it reminded me of what a gem Tartt's first work truly was.
Rating:
Summary: Embarassing
Review: It's easy to believe that Donna Tartt labored for a dozen years over this faux-Faulkner meets early John Grisham travesty (which has a few walk-ons from To Kill a Mockingbird, Tennessee Williams and Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood thrown in for good measure), because every sentence and image in the book is laborious indeed. What's less easy to believe is that the editors tasked with making this book into something as saleable as the Secret History let this unformed sprawling mess of a book go to press as written. First of all, which I find unforgivable in a major market book so long in the works, there are numerous "continuity errors." Minor things - a character who has gone to their own home on one page is on the back porch still chatting on the next, etc. and not so minor - our 12 year old heroine packs a heavy package at a key moment, then has the climb of her life (vividly detailed but with no mention of her cumbersome package), and then miraculously - after she summits - the package is back with her. Second, the same lack of attention is given to characters. A few characters are fully developed; others are painted in heavy detail in the opening chapters only to be completely abandoned once the "plot" picks up steam. And the writing is so heavy handed - everything is swimming in adjectives and adverbs - this isn't good writing, it's just copious writing. I could go on and on, but in sum the book is sorely disappointing - an intriguing character sketch in some places, but ultimately cartoonish. Each character seems to be visiting from another novel that you've already read, including the heroine Harriet, who is simply an overwritten version of her tomboyish, irritating and courageous literary older sister, Harriet the Spy (mixed with - you got it - Scout from TKM). And every stock cliche character from Southern literature and drama shows up (at great and unwelcome length) here: the loving, stern, yet sly and ultimately distant Black Mammy - give me a break. The faded flower of the confederacy spinster Aunts. The vague and incompetent former-belle Mother unable to recover from tragedy. The stern lady-like Grandmother clinging to her traditions of punchbowls and separate entrances for servants even though the beloved family plantation burned down decades ago. The lovable, well-meaning if initially scary Retarded Kid. The trailer dwelling, violent offspring of an Abusive Father. OK stop me - you get the point - don't buy this book. Wait for the movie, where at least the adjectives will be left on the cutting room floor.
Rating: 
Summary: Impressive, but still disappointing
Review: After the success of her first book, Donna Tartt did something I rather admire. She rested on her laurels, travelled, lived in London and Paris, bought a farm. . . so many writers follow up impressive debuts with rushed, second rate novels (Irvine Walsh, Zadie Smith et al) that it's nice to see someone taking their time. But in her second book, Tartt gives us too much of a good thing. The novel is brimming with breathtaking prose which effortlessly evokes the joys and terrors of childhood and life in the deep South. The characters are more realistic than the venal classics students of the Secret History, but less romantic and less defined - the aunts personalities seem to swim into each other. And although every scene is a small masterpiece, many of them are redundant, adding to the mood of the book, but not the plot.
Tartt has made fun of authors who write about 'trouble with the housekeeper', but the black maid moving to Florida is, sadly, one of the major plot points of 'The Little Friend.' The family cat dying is another. As the saying goes, a good writer has to kill their darlings, and there are literally hundreds of pages of incidental incidents in the Little Friend which only exist for the sake of themselves. There is, happily, no feel good ending, but in many respects, there is no ending at all, merely a climax and exposition.
Tartt finishes the book but not the story. The final pages, I suspect, were rewritten hundreds of times, until she finally gave up and published the ending she found the least disappointing. Still, Donna Tartt has done something new and different, and from any other author the Little Friend would be an incredible achievement - although if any other author had presented this to a publisher they would have been told to trim twenty percent and rewrite the ending again.
Rating: 
Summary: Extremely Disappointing Second Novel
Review: By way of background, I graduated from Ole Miss, which Tartt attended before transferring to Bennington college in Vermont, fictionalized as "Hampden College" in her first novel, "The Secret History." Way back when TSH first came out, I noticed a stack of signed copies in Square Books on the Oxford, Mississippi square, and bought a copy. I was absolutely mesmerized by the book, and read it in basically one long, continuous sitting over the course of a weekend. I thought it was the best book I'd ever read, and to this day I still count it among the best books I've read. I've given copies of TSH as gifts numerous times over the intervening years, and I've recommended it even more frequently. Thus, it was with great excitement that I awaited the publishing of Donna Tartt's second novel. I couldn't believe that, after the phenomenal success of TSH, she was taking as long as she was to write her second book, and several times over the years I went to the Internet to try to wade through the many conflicting rumors as to when her next book might arrive. I read the initial reviews of "The Little Friend," which were not very positive, with skepticism, and I hoped very much that they were inaccurate. Having read the TLF, however, I am very, very disappointed to report that the reviews were, in fact, accurate, and that "The Little Friend" is not even in the same league with "The Secret History." The primary problem with TLF from my perspective is that it is, in places, boring. Mind numbingly, excruciatingly boring. By the end of the first 100 pages, you have the gist of the plot down and, unfortunately, can also anticipate its resolution. However, Ms. Tartt spends the next 300 pages going into so much detail about the daily affairs of the protagonist, Harriet, and her friend, Hely, their families, etc., that I was literally looking ahead in the book wondering when the pace would pick up. I read a lot, and I have very rarely put a book down without finishing it, but I have to say that I was tempted to do so with this book. I assume that this middle section of the book was intended to fully develop the characters - which it does, but I never found myself caring for or even really liking the characters. My basic attitude throughout the bulk of the book was "let's get this over with so I can move on to read something else" - and at 550+ pages, it's not a short book. To be fair, the ending is a little more interesting, and there are some fairly novel twists thrown in. Ms. Tartt is a very gifted writer, and there are sections of this book that are beautifully written, but they are like diamonds scattered in the rough that is the boring bulk of this book. Despite the nine years between TSH and TLF, TLF feels as if it was sloppily written and edited - there are several noticeable grammatical errors and redundancies in descriptive language. (For example, on page 82: "In their midst sat Mrs. Godfrey, glassy-eyed, who sat eating ice cream from the harlequin-patterned dish." How many "sat"s do we need? Or, on only the second page of the prologue, page 4 of the book: ". . . the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirror-shards of nighmare which flared at the smell of wisteria . . ." and then, in the very next sentence: "Sometimes, these vivid flashes of memory seemed like pieces of a bad dream, . . ." Why use "nightmare" in one sentence and "bad dream" in the second? We get the point. These sections read like a first draft that was never properly edited.) It's almost like Ms. Tartt had too much time - because this seems to me like a 250-page novel that has been stretched into a 550+-page novel. If you want to read breathtakingly beautiful descriptive passages, read "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy. If you want to read a modern Southern gothic, read the amazing "The Heaven of Mercury" by Brad Watson. I am sorry to have to write a negative review of this book - especially since I loved "The Secret History" so much and waited so eagerly for the publication of "The Little Friend," but this is my honest opinion. Nonetheless, I'll still be looking out for her next book, hoping that it is more like TSH than TLF.
Rating:
Summary: ten years of garbage in the making
Review: I thought the book was very messy. You find emotions being forced onto the page which doesn't help at all. It is a labour to get on with it and at one point picked up war and peace and thought "maybe". Then i put it down again and thought it through. My conclusion was, do not buy this money making future film. it's a good flu/aeroplane/trashy read and no more.
Rating:
Summary: Little Friend, Big Story
Review: ... The book is so superbly written Donna Tartt should be getting a nomination for her painstaking effort to say the least. The action in the book at no point in time becomes weak or mindless entertainment, this is truly a thought out realistic story. The characters do fit real world behavior based on the events, especially the murder of a child. The obsessive pursuit of the killer is real but intense, hard to put this book down. The background settings of the story are so well defined yet not intrusive on the storyline that a person can join the protaganist in this hunt. The book has been edited well, I found no errors or missing sentences, all the English flows well and is clearly understood. All in all this is one of the finest novels I have ever had the pleasure, it also is a book whcih can leave you a bit smarter, I mean that in many senses, real life, and general knowledge...
Rating:
Summary: what friend?
Review: Since "the little friend" came out in Belgium september 14th, we could read it here about a month before the people in the USA.
Having loved "History", I was excited to read the new novel. Let there be no mistake, it is beautifully written, in the same hard worked-on style, with sentences of 20 lines (and more), with amazingly good observations and characters that are very well developed.
But, I'm affraid the book will stay on the shelves, half read, because, in my case, the characters don't interess me, I don't give a damn about what happens to them.
Sorry, I wish my English was better to express what I feel, but it comes over to me as if the novel is too polished, all raw edges are gone and what is left is "belleterie" with beautiful descriptions of nature and time and clothing and furniture and...
But what about the involvment with what happens to the people in the book? Frankly the story doesn't grab me by the throat,(nor anywhere else, for that matter) and aren't a good story and strong characters the most important things a good book needs?
Rating:
Summary: Well worth the wait
Review: Richer, deeper, stronger; that she took time working on this shows. Not in the painful way some authors clearly attempt to be "writerly", but in that she never steers you wrong or pulls you up too short with a clunker of a sentence. I finished this within a day of getting it, usually breathless and unable to do much besides read. It's been a long time since a book could make that happen. Those wanting "The Secret History, Redux" will not find it here; the protagonist is a young girl, the setting is Southern, and the narration is third-person, but those wanting a well-formed story and writing that is lyrically evocative, even more so than in her debut, should enjoy this. Unlike her first book, which begins in flashback and reflection, with critical plot elements openly detailed so that the suspense is in the telling, this story builds to its pitch in a more linear fashion. This, however, does not mean it is predictable; many things the book are not as they would seem to be, and therein lie many of the story's strengths. Miss Tartt not only does not disappoint, she further raises the bar for her next work.
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