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The Little Friend: Donna Tartt

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Although this is a large novel, Tartt has created a claustrophobic world in which there is little possibility of freedom for any character. It was a very interesting juncture in time to grow up, because you're aware of both of these things, and bits from each would intrude upon you. Farish Ratliff, an elder brother, runs the drug business with the help of Danny and the connivance of his grandmother, Gum.

And although in a way this is Harriet's coming of age story, it has happened in a world so paranoid and so enclosed that you hardly believe she will ever be able to grow up. The outlaw brothers Farish Ratliff and Danny Ratliff, caught up in a world of drugs, seem miserable most the time.

I was in Finland on my book tour last time and I was literally leaving my hotel in Helsinki and this young man rushed up all out of breath and said that he was a Finnish poet and he really liked my work and he wanted to meet me. At its best, her writing fuses seamlessly with its subject: heated when the events are heated, languorous when the moment slows, precise when she ferrets out the next turn of the plot. Her character's moral vacuum helps deepen the sense of a child treading water between the firm ground of childhood and the adult deep, but its ramifications are, in the end, curiously little explored. Her knowledge of Southern ethos—the importance of family, of heritage, of race and class—is central to the plot, as is her take on Southerners' ability to construct a repertoire, veering toward mythology, of tales of the past. At the same time, the contradictions between hype, success and privacy were already clear: as Bret Easton Ellis said, "You can't be Salinger and be represented by ICM.

Intelligent, indomitable, opinionated, quick and very well-read, the long, hot summer ahead without the constraints of either school or parental supervision school provide a fertile ground in which Harriet and her devoted schoolfriend, Hely, set out to find Robin’s killer. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines. What Tartt doesn't do is offer a cohesive literary blueprint to justify and connect all these finely wrought digressions. It is when Tartt almost glancingly describes the daily, lethargic weight of the sorrow that affects a family torn apart by the death of its most wanted child that she reveals her extraordinary qualities. Petty (and not so petty) criminals, they've also had their lives muddled and turned all around, most having spent time in prison.In the wake of Robin's death, a network that includes Harriet's grandmother Edith, Harriet's three great aunts - Libby, Tat, and Adelaide - and the housekeeper Ida coalesce to help raise Harriet and Allison while their mother retreats to her bedroom most days and her father moves to another state for his job and has an extended affair. The snake-handling preacher from Kentucky, Loyal Reese, represents a form of cheating death with his numerous boxes of venomous snakes and his preaching style.

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