Rating: 
Summary: Endlessly hoping for something to happen
Review: I guess I was expecting a mistery and got a sleeping aid instead. Honestly, I could only bear listening to the unabridged tapes while driving (there's nothing that I hate more than driving) and trying to fall asleep (for which the book did wonders).
I kept hoping that beyond the endless descriptions of characters there would be at least some lame attempt to make it into a story with a plot. The abridgement of an abridged version would at least get you through the pain more quickly.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Excellent premise, brilliant writing, but, in the end, very disappointing novel. A huge let down.
Rating:
Summary: A grim chore to finish.
Review: OK, whoever called this book a "page-turner" obviously had a very strong fan running nearby. Or else, they simply (like I was tempted to do) flipped past whole chapters unread. How did we all get sucked into this? Well, after The Secret History, this was the most anticipated novel in years. The premise (the unsolved murder of a child) and the creepy ventriloquist's dummy on the jacket promised a taut Gothic thriller. So did the first several pages, punctuated by the image of a 9-year-old boy found hanged with electrical cord from a backyard tree on a bright spring morning.
But that's it. The story then descends into an aimless morass of baffling scenes described in a relentlessly breathless style. Nobody walks or talks -- they darted, flew, shot, bolted, lunged, wailed, gasped, clawed, and they are endlessly "startled by" everything. Inexplicably, the entire middle swath of the book contains no reference to Robin's murder or the search for his killer. That's right: the entire premise is forgotten for some 300 pages which are filled with irrelevant scenes included presumably for Tartt's self-amusement. The Baptist youth camp - yeah, we know those religious freaks are wacko, but how is that relevant? The romance between Allison and the lifeguard - goes nowhere. The death of Aunt Libby, the firing of Hely's maid, the Adelaide-Sumner romance - all pointless and rendered in excruciating detail. I'm willing to forgive a weak structure if the characters and dialogue sparkle.
I'll overlook stock characters if the plot is tight and properly paced.
But, outside the one interesting charcter of Gum (the only reason for 2 stars, instead of one), I can't think of much to recommend this book - it became a grim homework-like chore to return to it merely to say I actually finished the damn thing.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Read
Review: Enjoyed the book very much. A page turner, I looked forward to reading it ever night. I think the lousy reviews on Amazon are way overdone. Judging by the ones written about this book I probably will not pay attention to them anymore as I read many books and found this one to be excellent. The first ten reviews I read on Amazon were pretty awful and not reflective of the book I read.
Rating: 
Summary: Started out good
Review: Well, Donna Tartt can write, no doubt about that. However, the beginning of The Little Friend will reel you in, and the middle and end will let you down. When I first picked up the book, I thought, finally, a good book I can sink my teeth in too. Not so.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting? Yes. Satisfying? Absolutely not.
Review: Long awaited and heavily anticipated second novel of Donna Tartt, The Little Friend is an utter disappointment. Having thoroughly enjoyed The Secret History, I, like many other Tartt fans, anxiously awaited her second novel, The Little Friend. Despite reviews waxing rhapsodic by such venerable and respected periodicals as Newsweek, the New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker, this novel simply does not live up to the hype. In a word, this novel is overrated. In composing this neo-Southern Goth story, Tartt exposes herself as a wannabe Harper Lee-meets-Shirley Jackson-meets-William Faulkner. Character development is at once brilliant and pointless, and at multiple and varying points, the reader has to wonder why Tartt went to all the trouble. Is this a coming-of-age story, or is it a murder/mystery? Upon completing the final pages of this book, I began to think the whole thing was an exercise in futility, both on Tartt's and my own part. Honestly, why in the world did I spend so much time with this book, only to come up with a completely unsatisfying conclusion, if one can call it that? There is something to be said for the "left hanging" style of literature that works so well for a short story and is so popular among modern authors, but really, why must I slog through over 600 densely-worded pages only to be left feeling cheated and like I would really like to get those hours of my life back? The prologue of this book pulls in the reader with the premise of a good old-fashioned mystery set in Smalltown, Mississippi in the 1970s. The reader quickly learns that the dysfunctional family Dufresnes, around whom this story is spun, had been shattered twelve years earlier by the as-yet-unsolved murder of eldest child Robin. Robin's youngest sister, Harriett, who was but an infant at the time his death, sets about solving and avenging Robin's murder in an attempt to heal her broken, secretive family. Along the way, she and her friend Hely simultaneously bait and stalk the Ratliffs, a family of down on their luck have-nots, one of whom they suspect, on the weakest of circumstantial evidence, had something to do with Robin's demise. The main problem with this premise is it is a misleading one. And the main problem with this novel is it leaves far too many questions unanswered. For starters, who exactly is "The Little Friend"? Harriett's friend Hely? Or is it ex-con Danny Ratliff, Harriett's number one suspect, who was coincidentally one of Robin's friends? Why was Harriett so keenly interested in Allison's dreams? Why did we not learn more about that connection, if any, with Robin's death? Why was Harriett's seizure disorder disclosed only in the last few pages of the story? Is Harriett Tartt's alter-ego? Tartt, with her Hawthorne-esque descriptions, and then in some instances repeated, paraphrased descriptions in the very next paragraph, displays a tendency toward hypergraphia, a common idiosyncracy among epileptics. To Tartt's credit, her mile-long descriptions had me almost smelling the mustiness of the Dufresnes' house wafting up from the pages of the book. Too many questions unanswered, not least of which is just who was Robin's murderer? Are we to believe that Harriett's illness and subsequent generalized grand mal seizure brought about a kind of "Wizard of Oz" bump-on-the-head, dreamlike experience to which we should attribute the preceeding plotline? Did any of it happen at all? Was this all just a dissociative, febral, hallucinatory experience on Harriett's part? At the end of the story, I kept picking up and re-examining the book to make sure I hadn't missed a few pages -- at least that would have explained the unsatisfactory ending. Is this a coming of age story, or is it a story about a sullen, uncooperative, self-centered child who is desperately seeking attention? One could play this tale as a girl in search of self and trying to "fix" her family, when in fact it seems that it is a sad parable of a paternalistic family that comes completely undone over the death of the eldest boy child. And like many So-Goth novels, this one contains some not-so-subtle homosexual undercurrents. Weaving the threads of family ties, is Tartt trying to point out to us that Harriett and her grandmother Edie are alike in more ways than appearance and stubborn determination? Like The Secret History, The Little Friend sags in the middle and makes the reader wonder if wading through all the text is really worth it in the end. At least in TSH, the ending gave some answers, even if they were partial answers. TLF tends to rattle along in fits and starts, then picks up momentum toward the end, making the reader feel that surely it was all worth it, that we'll come to the end and piece it all together. Unfortunately, that is just not the case. Yes, I'll admit it, I wanted a nice clean finale, tying up all the loose ends. Tartt really disappointed me with this bizarre, surreal ending.
Rating:
Summary: Books deserve endings
Review: I credit Donna Tartt with being a good writer for being able to keep the text mildly engaging for over 600 pages - even though next to nothing happens. Although many of the characters are caricatures, Harriett's character does seem very well developed, and, judging from the picture on the back of the book and what little I've read about Donna Tartt - is probably in large part based on her - so maybe conveying this character is not such a feat afterall. The ending is a HUGE disappointment. If I want to partake of disjointed, rambling, seemingly meaningless, unconnected events - I'll live my live. I read to avoid the monotony present in everyday life. It's bad enough that the momenutm of the story builds so slowly over 600 pages - but after all of that, to arrive at nothing is not very gratifying to say the least. All that said - despite this lackluster review - I would recommend this book 10x over some of the incomprehensibly popular books currently out - such as "Kavalier and Clay" and "The Secret Life of Bees".
Rating:
Summary: One of the Worst Books I've Ever Read
Review: I hated THE SECRET HISTORY, so I was reluctant to read THE LITTLE FRIEND and only did so at the urging of several friends. I do like Southern Gothic, so I thought I might just like Tartt's second book even though I thought her first was terrible. Well, I was wrong. I hated THE LITTLE FRIEND every bit as much as I hated THE SECRET HISTORY. Maybe more, if that's possible. The book begins well and it seems like Tartt is going to overcome the tendency she had in THE SECRET HISTORY to go on and on and on about the most trivial of matters. I was wrong about that, too, and that will certainly teach me to get my hopes up too soon. While THE LITTLE FRIEND begins with the revelation of a murder, this is far from a murder mystery, although what it is, I can't really say. I don't know if it's a character study or a coming of age novel, Southern Gothic or something else entirely different, and for that, I blame Tartt. She is simply not a good writer. He prose is awkward, her characters lack depth and her plot lacks cohesion. In fact, this is one of the most awkwardly constructed plots I've ever encountered. Tartt seems to have no sense of structure at all, not even basic structure. The central character of THE LITTLE FRIEND is Harriet, the young sister of the murdered boy. It is Harriet who finally sets out to solve the mystery of her brother's murder, but, in attempting to do so, she encounters so many meaningless characters and so many coincidences that I finally found myself beginning to wish she were dead as well. I also found myself angry with Tartt for portraying some of the characters (the financially poorer ones) as stereotypical. Her portrayal of wealthier white families and their black servants will anger many readers, too, I am sure. My thought, when reading this book, was "Why?" Why stoop to silly cliches rather than giving us something emotionally honest and real? The book almost seemed funny at times, but I am sure it was meant to be taken very seriously. Tartt seems to love to write about violence and there is plenty of violence of the worst kind in THE LITTLE FRIEND, but, because her characters have no emotional depth, because it's so hard to feel empathy for them, the violence seems extraneous...without meaning...added just for shock value. I hated it. The prose in THE LITTLE FRIEND is very uneven. I think part of the difficulty is that Tartt is simply a bad writer. For example, rather than utilizing descriptive verbs, Tartt has filled the pages of this book with strings of descriptive adjectives, something I thought any first year writing student knew was anathema. I think another part of Tartt's problem could be that she seems bent on writing very long novels or none at all (which would really be the better choice) and she really doesn't have enough "story" to fill 600 pages plus. In addition to her penchant for over-describing, Tartt also has no sense of pacing. This book just plods and plods and plods along, much in the way THE SECRET HISTORY did. I could forgive Tartt for this if she had given us some semblance of a compelling story...but sadly, she hasn't. And what of that ending? Or, to be more exact, what of that non-ending? After I slog and plod my way through a badly written book the size of THE LITTLE FRIEND, I want some sort of closure with the characters. It doesn't have to be happy; it just has to be satisfying. Tartt seems to have filled her book with every sort of descriptive adjective she knew and then just stopped. When I reached the end of the book I felt as though a page had been ripped out of my copy. After checking with some friends, I found out that no, it hadn't been. I don't think I need to tell you that I've sworn off Donna Tartt forever. I won't be picking up one of her books again even if an entire box of them lands on my doorstep free of charge. I have too many other, far more worthy books to read (and laundry and cooking and gardening to do). I wouldn't recommend THE LITTLE FRIEND to an enemy, much less to a friend. It certainly left a bitter taste in my mouth. I threw my copy away. I wouldn't be cruel enough to donate this book to a library or give it to a friend.
Rating:
Summary: A decent read...
Review: I really liked this book despite the main character Harriet. The book built up momentum slowly but by the end I couldn't read fast enough. I do suggest that anyone who wants to read Donna Tartt should start with The Little Friend and then read The Secret History. I think you're bound to be disappointed if you read TLF before TSH. And I strongly recommend The Secret History. Its excellent.
Rating:
Summary: AAAACK!
Review: Most reviewers here have hit the proverbial nail on the head regarding Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend". I only wish I'd read them before I wasted money and time on this rambling, long-winded, unresolved tome. Hire an editor, Donna baby, please!
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