The Little Friend

By: Donna Tartt

Narrated by: Karen White

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. • “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review

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. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.©2002 Donna Tartt; (P)2002 Books On Tape, Inc.

Critic reviews

"This extraordinary book [has] a main character, a twelve-year-old girl named Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, who ranks up there with Huck Finn, Miss Havisham, Quentin Compson, and Philip Marlowe, fictional characters who don't seem in the least fictional . . . If To Kill a Mockingbird is the childhood that everyone wanted and no one really had, The Little Friend is childhood as it is, by turns enchanting and terrifying."
--Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"Breathtaking . . . A sublime tale rich in religious overtones, moral ambiguities, and violent, poetic acts . . . From its darkly enticing opening, we are held spellbound." --Lisa Shea, Elle

"Readers are easily swept up in [a] darkly comic novel that . . . broadens to examine Southern racial and social strata, religious and generational eccentricities, and the passion of youth that gives way to the ambivalence of age. At times humorous, at times heartbreaking, The Little Friend is most surprising when it is edge-of-your-seat scary." --Dennis Moore, USA Today

"A sprawling story of vengeance, told in a rich, controlled voice . . . Tartt has written a grownup book that captures the dark, Lord of the Flies side of childhood and classic children's literature."
--James Poniewozik, Time

But I invested 22 hours!

After Donna Tart skillfully pulled me into this fascinating and well-constructed drama, got me to understand and feel for the vivid characters (Go, Harriet!), and wove an intriguingly tangled yet believable web between them, she just CUT OFF the story! I thought there must have been a Part 4 I'd forgotten to download. While some stories end this way on purpose (real life often has loose ends, right?) they usually let you know in some way that it's been done on purpose, that you're supposed to ponder something because of it, etc. This one just ended with NOTHING. All the loose ends were still loose, and more was unresolved than at the beginning. Which would have been ok, really, if Ms. Tart had just communicated in some way that this was the point of the whole thing. The way she left it, however, was very disappointing. Especially since I didn't want to put it down! I feel so cheated.

It's Donna Tartt

Really, what else do you need to know?

Jump in and follow Harriet, one of the most gripping characters in modern literature. She's the independent, super-strong, serious, brainy serial killer, and she's not yet 13.

not what I expected

it's a good drama but I was surprised with the abrupt end. the performance was great and engaging. the story and characters had a good atmosphere surrounding them. reminds me of Tom sawyer

What a great story teller!

I love her stories! So detailed! You just get sucked right in like you're there, living it with the characters.

Couldn't finish because of the narration

How did the narrator detract from the book?

The lack of proper inflection and intonation this that this narrator presented as she virtually barked the story to us resulted in such and uneasy and confusing cadence that I found the story impossible to follow. I made it to chapter 6 - which in this book, was quite far! But at that point I realized that I had little idea of what was going on in the story simply because the narrator made it so difficult to follow. I will definitely try this book in hard copy, as it seems to be a beautifully written story.