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Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil. The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet - unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss.
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Never expected to be disappointed by Donna Tartt but here we are. I think the biggest issue is the fact that I'm comparing Donna to herself (The Secret History can't be topped) but there's also the issue of me heavily disliking both the characters and the setting. Illiterate, religious, racist rednecks is not a demographic group I care about in general and the fact that they are the focus of the book put me off from the very beginning, combined with the heavy usage of the n-word as time appropriate as it was. Not to mention that the identity of Robin's killer wasn't revealed the entire time which ruined the building anticipation. I'm well aware that Donna Tartt is way too smart for me with the amount of symbolism she adds to her books but this one didn't click for me.
0Very torn because it’s beautifully and interestingly written but almost for no reason because it goes no where. I struggle to give it the same rating as the Goldfinch because I think that it wasn’t as good but at the same times it’s still not bad enough a book for only two stars. It has similar flaws being overly draw out but with even less pay off at the end.
0*insert jimmy bullard meme where he's like knew i could do it, get me out of this shithole* should have dnf'ed this at 100 pages don't know why i continued this book is 90% filler and 10% plot and no reedemable characters or qualities to be found anywhere. big contender for worst read of the year
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