Review: The Little Friend, Donna Tartt

2.5/5 ⭐; spoilers ahead

Three books into my Autumn TBR and I encountered my first “miss”. As I wrote in a previous post, I’m slowly making my way through my years-long TBR [with some tweaks here and there]. The Little Friend by Donna Tartt earned its spot on my TBR because I read The Secret History and The Goldfinch, books I loved. I wanted more from Donna Tartt, so I bought the other available novel of hers.

I don’t know how long it sat on my shelf before I finally pulled it out and set it to the side to have it in my line of sight. Turns out, I had too high expectations for The Little Friend. I based those on her other two novels that had both characters and plot so well-rounded and compelling. The prose was beautiful in both and, at least, this aspect remained constant in The Little Friend.

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Review - beware spoilers!

The novel opens with the tragic death of 9-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes which deeply affects his family, especially his mother. His two younger sisters are henceforth raised by their black nanny/housemaid Ida, and by their mother’s family: their grandmother and her sisters. Harriet, the youngest of Robin’s sisters, the rogue and troublemaker of the family, now 12 years old, sets out to find out who killed her brother. Hely Hull, her careless energetic best friend, joins the effort. Throughout the book, family dynamics, drug addiction, racism, mental disability, and trauma are explored.

My thoughts are quite jumbled up, so to make this easier on myself to organize and, hopefully, for you to read, I’m dividing the review into sections.

Plot: The main plot idea is to find who killed Robin. It’s talked about at the beginning, touched upon in the middle, and once again emphasized in the end. What I liked, is that the ‘investigation’ is being conducted by two 12-year-old kids, but the investigation itself is so short-lived and other things interfere that half-way through the novel I had to think long and hard if they had made any progress.

I didn’t like that there was almost no plot, actually. It’s the beginning of something, sure, but it barely evolves. Then the perspectives are switching, showing Harriet Cleve Dufresnes and what she’s doing, thinking and getting herself into, then there’s the Ratliff brothers that get a lot of page time, too, focused on how to best benefit from their up-and-coming drug business. The switch in perspectives is understandable since Ratliff’s are the main suspects. But the plot gets away and, in turn, The Little Friend becomes a novel about the Ratliff dysfunctional family and the somewhat functional clean-cut Dufresnes family.

We never find out who killed - or if someone killed - Robin.

Characters: I hated most of the characters. What I mean by this: they were well-written, rounded, given traits and personalities that enriched the story. But I didn’t like them as ‘people’. Maybe because I saw too much in them or too little, maybe because I associated them with people I know. Whatever happened there, I couldn’t get behind most of the characters. Plus, there are some characters, like some of the Ratliff’s that the reader is clearly not supposed to like, but can empathize with.

I did like Harriet, the rebel child, the trouble maker, the free thinker. I saw the version of me that I wanted to be at 12.

The Dufresnes family, particularly Harriet’s great-aunts drive this book from the background and their contrasting personalities make for several humorous situations.

The Ratliff’s, particularly Danny and Farish, are all over the place. Tartt did a wonderful job at presenting the confusion, hypervigilance and paranoia that comes with hard drug addiction. It was terrifying to read at points, for example, Farish’s arc which culminates with a psychotic break.

Considering I had to refocus several times on the question “Who killed Robin?”, I didn’t overlook side characters - as little page time as some had, they were still uniquely built and rendered.

The events of the novel take place somewhere in the 1970s [fun cameo by Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? as a TV show, btw] and the relationship between white and black characters and the roles which the black characters take reflect that era in US. Tartt draws attention to racism, sometimes subtly, sometimes tackling it head-on.

There are three prominent characters that display mental disability or illness: the youngest Ratliff brother, and Harriet’s mom and sister.

Writing: The writing is good, what I knew Donna Tartt is capable of. The narration flows nicely, the descriptions vivid and the atmosphere just right to be able to imagine the fictional town of Alexandria, Mississippi. The prose is simple, allowing the reader to get lost inside the story and the narration is quite straight forward, unless the character on page is chaotic and the writing must show that.

Tartt expertly maneuvered between the sane, level-headed, sometimes needed fiery narration attributed to Harriet and the disorganized, chaotic, rushed narration specific to Danny and Farish Ratliff.

Overall impressions: It’s not a bad book. I just couldn’t find the connection with this book because, truthfully, I was biased from the beginning by expecting a fluid narration of a mystery. Instead, I was greeted by a large cast of characters with complex traits, a plot that came and went as the wind blows, and, at times, too long a description of character points that could have been left out as they, in my opinion, did not enrich the story as they should have.