Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely Mesmerizing
Review: This is a breathtaking story that looks into the heart of the human condition. As a young girl searches for the person who murdered her brother, she faces the ugly truth about racism, hate, and the evil that people hide away - even from themselves. A novel that has all the tension of a thriller, it also has great emotional depth.This is a book that readers will not soon forget - by a writer that will be around for a long time.
Rating: 
Summary: Harriet is Misunderstood and So Is This Novel
Review: In reading the customer reviews of Donna Tart's The Little Friend, I am confused. I found this book riveting. How can any one find a character as weird and wonderful as Harriet Cleve "boring"? Harriet is anything but boring. Perhaps she is misunderstood as boring because she does not act the way most readers would like her to. Harriet is a moody, brooding little girl who has lost her brother Robin in a mysterious murder and Harriet has lost her entire family to Time. Harriet must create herself in an atmosphere that includes a drugged mom, a bland older sister, and an absent father. She takes nothing on face value, including the Bible. Instead, in this queer atmosphere she is drawn toward the dark side of humanity. She is fascinated by magic - who wouldn't be, given the fact that she as a baby was present at her own brother's murder? Harriet is a vastly interesting and fully-rounded character, but perhaps many readers aren't ready for her because she isn't all roses and sunshine - she's a product of her dark situation.
Rating: 
Summary: how low can you go
Review: Without hesitation the worst book I read in at least 2 years.
Donna Tartt has managed to wrtie a book, that doesn't reach the high standards she had with her first book.
This book is something like a Stephen King scenario where nothing specials happens.
My feeling is there are a lot of chances to get more in the relationship between a the main characters. Now it remains at a quite predictabel level.
Rating: 
Summary: Like Secret History, the ending was a bust
Review: After 600+ pages of intricate character development which, one felt, must surely lead to an extravagant conclusion, the novel suddenly grinds to a halt. Maybe that was the point. The crime that was unsolved for so many years was, in the end, unsolveable. But I felt there were so many interesting possibilities for what could have happened between Harriet and Danny Ratliff or, perhaps, others of the characters that never did. That's probably how a real-life story would turn out, but in fiction, the reader expects some sort of conclusion. I remember feeling the same way about Tartt's first novel, The Secret History. The attention to detail and the sheer volume of information about each character and the interactions of the characters with each other had me spellbound. Yet, in the end, the characters merely fade away into a drunken and lethargic haze. In fact, both these books remind me of a typical French art film which simply ends when the budget is depleted or the director has had enough either long before or long after the story has come to a reasonable conclusion. Maybe Tartt should try her hand at non-fiction. Her skills and interests seem more suited to that to me.
Rating:
Summary: Accesssible Faulkner
Review: Tartt has written a novel with all of Faulkner's insights about the South in clear, enjoyable prose. She adds the element of likeable characters and believable women, both black and white. She has captured the language of the white "redneck" class: "on" is exactly how we say "going to," "I'm on tell you one more time." Even as insignificant a character as an Indian doctor in a small Mississippi town is captured perfectly.
Complaints that the mystery is unresolved are completely beside the point: the novel is about the search for solutions, not solutions themselves. And Harriet is as winning a child as appears in American fiction.
Rating:
Summary: The clue is in the title........
Review: I've never come across a book with a more insipid title, and it should have been a dead giveaway as to what's in store. If you think about it, who in their right mind would write 500 odd pages and after all that effort, name it something so nondescript.
Sadly the reviews are accurate - there's no plot to speak of, which I have to agree is a bit much after hauling that bulk around in the hope of some closure. I don't blame Ms Tartt so much, I like the sound of my own voice as much as she does, but what did her editors think they were being paid for??
Rating:
Summary: Greek tragedy--Mississippi style
Review: Donna Tartt, a classicist, structures this novel like a Greek tragedy. The death of Harriet's brother Robin is not the central event in the novel, but the starting point that sets the tragic events in motion. Harriet, believing that she can solve the mystery of Robin's death, with just a hunch to guide her and the worshipful boosterism of her equally ignorant chum, confronts a young man from the wrong side of the tracks in an escalating conflict that comes to a battle of life and death. Finally, Harriet, who is mostly abandoned by her family, has to face this threat totally alone--and she has to reckon with her own hubris in bringing about this crisis. She will be forever scarred by what she has done, but she is wiser for it all. Two families are on a collision course,and the novel is resolved when they meet in a horrifying climax. To say that the ending is not resolved is not to understand the point of the book. Empathy is generated by understanding the heartbreak of the wasted suffering on the part of both parties --neither one is totally innocent or guilty. The last chapter just illustrates the total ignorance of the rest of the community of what has happened, and how the main characters will have to bear their grief alone for the rest of their lives. The comedy of life in a small town rises to the level of tragedy--fate takes its course once the events are set in motion, leaving the reader with a profound catharsis.
Rating: 
Summary: Yeah, but...
Review: I don't usually demand a fully resolved ending to a book. I don't need everything handed to me on a silver platter, literature-wise. This one, however, needed some resolution to justify how it was constructed.
I've heard this novel described as a coming-of-age slice of life, which would be fine, but "The Little Friend" isn't written like a slice of life. It's written like a Southern gothic murder mystery, with much loving, beautifully-written detail afforded to subplots that we're led to believe are essential, but ultimately go exactly nowhere.
This book doesn't know what it wants to be. One star for the writing, which is great if a little too untrammeled, and one for the interesting characters. I wish I'd passed it by, though.
Rating:
Summary: Little Friend, Big Images
Review: Donna Tartt is a writer's writer. Her image is amazing, her characters provocative. She's not afraid to go in to dark places, which is precisely why I enjoyed reading this book. Structurally she gets a way with murder and the important reviewers, New York Times, etc., seem not to notice.
Elizabeth Appell, Author of LESSONS FROM THE GYPSY CAMP
Rating:
Summary: Still jonesing for my Donna Tartt fix
Review:
I concur with what the other 2-3 star-giving reviewers have written (ie. this book was beautifully written but an ultimate let down). I am suprised by two criticisms however. First, many complain of it's length and detail. The loving attention to flushing out her characters and setting mood and tone through description is what we expect from Ms Tartt. It may not be your cup of tea, but that's what you signed on for when you cracked this book. I, for one, would read 2000 pages of Ms Tartt's writing, but feel that I should have been given an ending with resolution (and I'm not talking about solving the murder).
The second comment I am surprised by is more minor but given the adamant reviews it has been mentioned in I'm baffled. Namely, some reviewers posit that there is no "little friend" or wonder what that term alludes to. Ms Tartt tells us expressly that Danny Ratliffe was Robin's "little friend". But, of course the term is also very nicely mirrored in the relationship of Hely to Harriet and Harriet to Ida (among many other friendships in the novel).
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