the secret history and the little friend

' The Little Friend, however, wipes out.This may be because, between the book's grand dramatic scenes, long passages meander without direction.' - The Economist (…) 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.

'Tension created in a somnolent setting is key to how this novel works.

Another is the prose, which is rich, intelligent, and takes its time (.) There is a lot to admire and enjoy in The Little Friend too much so, in some respects, since the novel does lose momentum over its 555 pages.' - John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph

'This range of characters, which comes with a fine selection of minor gargoyles, is one of The Little Friend's strengths.

Tartt is an exquisite, if unrestrained, stylist who can beautifully render the inner life (.) What Tartt doesn't do is offer a cohesive literary blueprint to justify and connect all these finely wrought digressions.' - Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

' The Little Friend can sometimes seem more like a young-adult adventure novel - Treasure Island with metaphors - than the greater work its best moments surely warrant.

Many reservations but generally impressed.Īnd almost all feel obligated to draw comparisons to Tartt's previous novel, The Secret History. General information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author In the audiobook, the narrator picks up on her descriptions and leans in by deciding to give caricature accents of Black people, Korean people, etc.Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs. In fact, the same could be said for The Secret History, but not so much for her second novel, The Little Friend (which is set in ’70s Mississippi). The racism (homophobia and xenophobia) by other characters and Theo goes unchecked. In some negative descriptions of white people, she still uses their proximity to Eastern Europe to make tropes straight out of a Bram Stoker novel-or, in at least one case, describes a man in a criminal manner that references Chinese culture and style. However, regarding the racism descriptions, this includes things like making the brown (mostly Latinx) domestic staff cheery people happy to serve, Black women described in a way that emphasizes weight and tempter, and Asian women sexualized and infantilized.

Most of the subtext gets into the plot and the McGuffin device that I’m not getting into here because Castro does it so well. Every review that takes this into account, including Castro’s and Ayşegül Savaş, gives a bevy of examples of direct, in-text racism just left for the reader and a handful of subtext.

The secret history and the little friend