Review of The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

Stood in the bookstore, I picked up this book, read the blurb and turned to the first page; something I always do when making a decision over a selection of books. The opening sentence, ‘For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have the Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening rather than noon, after Church, which is when the Cleves usually had it’, plunges straight into the novel and sold the book to me.

Tartt uses Harriet, the dead boy’s sister, to create an image of family life in the American South and illustrate the impact that the death had on the family. The young girl becomes fixated on discovering the truth behind his death over one long summer, her adventurous and determined character is not discouraged by the challenges that arise and she fights her battles regardless of the dangerous characters that she meets along the way.

In contrast to many other novels I have recently read, Tartt successfully creates a family that we can picture; their misfortunes impacting them all in very different ways. Tartt portrays the cruel and poor treatment of the less fortunate on the outside of town and we are living amongst this society, with the characters, in the 1970’s.

Her structural choices and use of adjectival triplets, ‘airy, charming, sparkling with life’, highlight Tartt’s deliberate efforts to change the tone and pace of the novel. I enjoyed the start of this novel but feel as though I lost my way towards the end; I was not captured by the plot as many readers were and felt a sense of relief and annoyance when I finished the last page and turned to the next, expecting there to be more.