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Book Review: The Little Friend
Jul. 3rd, 2020 07:34 amI finally finished Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, which I’ve been hacking my way through for a while. Like The Goldfinch, this book is an unevenly paced hot mess, but unlike The Goldfinch, I’m not sure if it was ultimately worth it for the good parts.
The one part of the book that I loved was Harriet. When Harriet was just a baby, her nine-year-old brother Robin was murdered; now twelve, Harriet decides that she wants to solve the murder. Harriet is intense, intelligent, slightly unnerving with her sullen lack of social graces - in short she reminded me of myself as a twelve-year-old, although it must be said that I lacked Harriet’s single-minded fixity of purpose.
This quote, in particular, resonated with me.
Or this one: the horror of realizing that one is about to become a teenage girl in a society that hates teenage girls, and people are going to look at you and see nothing but your body when everything important about you is in your mind.
Unfortunately, the book is not entirely in Harriet’s POV. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say unfortunately, because I enjoyed a number of the POV excursions: Harriet’s aunts, her grandmother, her older sister Allison. There’s an element of family history novel about the book which I enjoyed, although that’s not really the purpose of the book so it never fully blooms.
However, we also spend a lot of time in the POVs of two members of the local no-account lowlife drug-running family, the Ratliffs, who I found unpleasant to read about, not entirely convincing, and also just… I’m not sure what they’re doing there? What are they bringing to the book?
( Spoilers )
The one part of the book that I loved was Harriet. When Harriet was just a baby, her nine-year-old brother Robin was murdered; now twelve, Harriet decides that she wants to solve the murder. Harriet is intense, intelligent, slightly unnerving with her sullen lack of social graces - in short she reminded me of myself as a twelve-year-old, although it must be said that I lacked Harriet’s single-minded fixity of purpose.
This quote, in particular, resonated with me.
She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what “growing up” entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.
Or this one: the horror of realizing that one is about to become a teenage girl in a society that hates teenage girls, and people are going to look at you and see nothing but your body when everything important about you is in your mind.
Harriet was going to be in the eighth grade next year; and what she had not expected was the horrifying new indignity of being classed--for the first time--a “Teen Girl”: a creature without mind, wholly protuberance and excretion, to judge from the literature she was given. She had not expected the chipper, humiliating filmstrips filled with demeaning medical information; she had not expected mandatory “rap sessions” where the girls were not only urged to ask personal questions--some of them, to Harriet’s mind, frankly pornographic--but to answer them as well.
Unfortunately, the book is not entirely in Harriet’s POV. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say unfortunately, because I enjoyed a number of the POV excursions: Harriet’s aunts, her grandmother, her older sister Allison. There’s an element of family history novel about the book which I enjoyed, although that’s not really the purpose of the book so it never fully blooms.
However, we also spend a lot of time in the POVs of two members of the local no-account lowlife drug-running family, the Ratliffs, who I found unpleasant to read about, not entirely convincing, and also just… I’m not sure what they’re doing there? What are they bringing to the book?
( Spoilers )
