Tartt, Donna. The Little Friend. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
In a nutshell The Little Friend is about Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, a twelve-year-old girl who decides she simply must solve the mystery of who killed her nine-year-old brother when she was just an infant. All Harriet knows of the incident is that little Robin was found hung from a tree on Mother’s Day and nobody knew why. During her attempts to solve the mystery Harriet and her sidekick Hely get themselves into troubles far more adult than their years. Larger Mississippi-southern issues such as poverty and prejudice encircle more complicated crimes such as deception, drugs, and death.
I love the way Donna Tartt writes, but was confused by plot. 555 is a long time to be reading about a mystery that doesn’t really get solved. The ambiguous ending is ripe for a sequel. Yet, there are seemingly unimportant characters that float in and out of the plot without an apparent role in the story (like Harriet’s sister Allison). Could they come back with a stronger presence in another book? One other concern is that The Little Friend is supposed to be a story set in the 1970’s. Were there meth labs back then?
When you first meet Harriet you think she has all the beginnings of a serial killer: “She could set the house on fire if she wanted to, and no one would be there to stop here” (p 67), and “…this was the hallmark of Harriet’s touch: she could scare the daylights out of you, and you weren’t even sure why” (p 74).
BookLust Twist: There is no doubt in my mind that Nancy Pearl loved this book and thought of it often. Case in point: it’s mentioned in Book Lust in the chapters “Families in Trouble” (p 82) because after little Robin is found murdered, nothing is ever the same for his family, and “Girls Growing Up” (p 102) because Harriet, Robin’s sister, grows up between the 555 pages of The Little Friend, as well as in the introduction (p xi) where Pearl says she knew she would love The Little Friend from the very first sentence. Little Friend is also mentioned in More Book Lust in the chapters “Lines that Linger; Sentences that Stick” (p 143) – the same first sentence Pearl mentioned in Book Lust, and “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” (p 238) because of its creepy doll face – a total of five mentions between the two Lust books. I can’t blame Pearl because Little Friend does fit nicely into each and every chapter mentioned.
~*LunaSea*~ 