Review: The Little Friend | A Portrait of Tartt’s Mississippi

Title: The Little Friend

Author: Donna Tartt

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Publication Date: October 22, 2002

Rating: 4 Stars

Dear fellow Babblers,

I recently finished The Little Friend and though I’ve had nothing but the very best to say about Tartt thus far through my previous post (How to Review a quasi Proustian Novel: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch) as well as the comments I’ve been leaving all over other book reviewer’s posts about The Goldfinch and The Secret History, I can’t say the same will be done with The Little Friend in terms of narrative. BUT I stand by my theory of Tartt’s utterly vivid descriptive style that sweeps us into an imaginatively evocative world that we would otherwise have no access to.
So… rather than feed y’all some lengthy review recounting the numerous plot turns (dare I call them disappointing?) and sporadic alterations of focalizers (dare I call the shifts confusing?) that occur in this 555-page world, I figured I would instead paint you a panorama of the stiflingly idle and overbearingly tainted Alexandria, Mississippi where the story unfolds… 

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