The Little Friend, Donna Tartt
The Little Friend, Donna Tartt
2 Rating(s)
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The Little Friend

Author: Donna Tartt

Narrator: Karen White

Unabridged: 26 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/24/2002


Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. •  “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review

The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.

About The Author

Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into 30 languages. Her novel The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014. That same year she was included in Time magazine's list of the "100 Most Influential People."Karen White is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels, including the Tradd Street series, The Night the Lights Went OutFlight PatternsThe Sound of GlassA Long Time Gone, and The Time Between. She is the coauthor of The Forgotton Room with New York Times bestselling authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig. She grew up in London but now lives with her husband and two children near Atlanta, Georgia.


Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Tracy on 2008-01-23 20:20:27

Possibly one of the worst I've ever read. The author spends too much time on trite items and not enough on major plotlines. Can't understand why this was a bestseller. One of the most torturous reads of my life.

Goodreads review by Tina on July 25, 2007

I sort of want to scream when I read lukewarm reviews of this book. Admittedly, people may get the wrong idea when they read the back jacket, or the first few pages, and anticipate some sort of murder mystery thrill. The death of Harriet's brother is merely background for her character. The skill wit......more

Goodreads review by emma on July 12, 2024

A lot of things happened in this book, but at the same time... And in a much more real way... Nothing did. I tend to like Donna Tartt's writing enough that she could cook up a book with no plot, just vibes, and I'd be pleased, but I also tend to find Tartt's writing atmospheric and consuming, borderlin......more

Goodreads review by Pedro on April 07, 2020

This is not The Secret History and definitely not The Goldfinch but that doesn’t justify the low rating and negative reviews on here. Well, actually, just by thinking that a novel like The Goldfinch doesn’t even have a 4 star rating on average says a lot, not about the novel itself but about its rea......more

Goodreads review by jessica on June 24, 2020

i love DTs writing with every fibre of my being, but i have to be honest - the low average rating/poor reviews for this book had pushed me away from reading it for the longest time - i didnt want to ruin my high opinion of DT. fortunately, i didnt hate this like i thought i would! this is not without......more


Quotes

"This extraordinary book [has] a main character, a twelve-year-old girl named Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, who ranks up there with Huck Finn, Miss Havisham, Quentin Compson, and Philip Marlowe, fictional characters who don't seem in the least fictional . . . If To Kill a Mockingbird is the childhood that everyone wanted and no one really had, The Little Friend is childhood as it is, by turns enchanting and terrifying."
--Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"Breathtaking . . . A sublime tale rich in religious overtones, moral ambiguities, and violent, poetic acts . . . From its darkly enticing opening, we are held spellbound." --Lisa Shea, Elle

"Readers are easily swept up in [a] darkly comic novel that . . . broadens to examine Southern racial and social strata, religious and generational eccentricities, and the passion of youth that gives way to the ambivalence of age. At times humorous, at times heartbreaking, The Little Friend is most surprising when it is edge-of-your-seat scary." --Dennis Moore, USA Today

"A sprawling story of vengeance, told in a rich, controlled voice . . . Tartt has written a grownup book that captures the dark, Lord of the Flies side of childhood and classic children's literature."
--James Poniewozik, Time


Awards

  • Orange Prize for Fiction