Editors Reads Verdict
A richer and stranger novel than The Secret History — Tartt's portrait of a Mississippi childhood and the violence beneath its surface is one of the great evocations of American place in contemporary fiction.
What We Loved
- The recreation of 1970s Mississippi — its social hierarchies, its heat, its particular quality of time — is extraordinarily vivid
- Harriet is a genuinely original child protagonist — fierce, bookish, morally serious, and completely unable to process the world she is investigating
- The novel's refusal to resolve the central mystery is honest and brave — some things stay obscure
Minor Drawbacks
- Readers who want the mystery solved will be disappointed — Tartt is interested in the investigation, not the resolution
- The pacing is more deliberate than The Secret History, and some readers find the middle sections slow
Key Takeaways
- → Children construct narratives of justice that bear no necessary relationship to how justice actually operates
- → The past is never past in Southern Gothic fiction — Robin's death shadows every page, reshaping every character's present
- → Social class in the American South operates through a complexity of codes that the children in the novel are just beginning to learn and already cannot escape
| Author | Donna Tartt |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Vintage |
| Pages | 576 |
| Published | October 22, 2002 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Mystery, Southern Gothic |
The Little Friend Review
The Little Friend took Donna Tartt ten years to write after The Secret History, and it is a deliberately different kind of novel: Southern Gothic rather than campus noir, a child’s-eye view of violence rather than an insider’s, and resolutely uncommitted to providing the satisfactions of conventional mystery. Its admirers consider it her richest achievement; its detractors find it beautiful but frustrating. Both responses are comprehensible, and Tartt seems to have anticipated both.
The novel is set in a Mississippi town in the early 1970s. At its center is Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, twelve years old, bookish, fierce, and obsessed with avenging the death of her older brother Robin, who was found hanged in the family’s backyard when she was an infant. The murder was never solved. Harriet has decided — on the basis of almost no evidence — that a man from a local criminal family called Danny Ratliff is responsible, and she constructs an elaborate and increasingly dangerous plan to punish him.
What unfolds is less a thriller than an immersion in the texture of a specific place and time. Tartt’s Mississippi — its smells, its hierarchies, its boredom, its sudden violence — is one of the most fully realised environments in contemporary American fiction. The old ladies who orbit Harriet’s grief-stricken family, the Ratliff brothers in their trailer, the grandfather who is kind but distant: these are characters embedded in a world dense enough to resist the simplifications that genre fiction requires. The central mystery remains unsolved, as it would in life. Whether this is honesty or evasion is a question each reader answers differently.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Little Friend" about?
Twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve Dufresnes sets out to solve the murder of her brother Robin, who was hanged from a tree in the family's backyard when she was a baby. Tartt's second novel is a Mississippi Gothic that explores childhood, violence, and the limits of the stories we tell ourselves.
What are the key takeaways from "The Little Friend"?
Children construct narratives of justice that bear no necessary relationship to how justice actually operates The past is never past in Southern Gothic fiction — Robin's death shadows every page, reshaping every character's present Social class in the American South operates through a complexity of codes that the children in the novel are just beginning to learn and already cannot escape
Is "The Little Friend" worth reading?
A richer and stranger novel than The Secret History — Tartt's portrait of a Mississippi childhood and the violence beneath its surface is one of the great evocations of American place in contemporary fiction.
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