The Little Friend

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.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"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

Loved It!

I heart Donna Tartt, but I really loved David Pittu's reading of the Goldfinch, and I think it would be fantastic if Audible re-released both "Little Friend + Secret Hist." w/him as the narrator.

Overall; I really have no words for the quality of Donna Tartt books ... she's simply amazing!

Good story, bad reading

Sadly, the long and somewhat complicated story is boycotted by the overly pronounced performance by Karen White. At first I actually thought I couldn't go on with the book because of the unnatural and mannered way of accentuating the words and phrases. It irritated me so much that in future I will carefully avoid books read by her.

Great Southern Story

This is an older book and hasn't been reviewed for a while and I think it deserves an update. I almost didn't give it a shot due to the negative reviews about the narrator, but I'm so glad that I did. She is a bit emphatic in her reading, but it calms down once she gets into the story and frankly, I think she does a great job with the various voices, including genteel Southern from northern Mississippi. Being from West Tennessee, which is more like Mississippi than the rest of Tennessee, these are voices and characters that I grew up with and know well. The cast is substantial, well-developed, quirky as appropriate, and the black dialect is spot-on for the time. The story is fresh, unique, and has the undeniable ring of reality and honesty which gives it the best kind of interest for a reader - kinship.

awful narrator

So upset that I spent $14 on this just to stop after hour 1 because of the awful narration. The over exaggerated southern accent and barking voice, I just couldn’t handle it. So disappointed

More great characters and story from Donna Tartt

I downloaded this one following my read of THE GOLDFINCH, which I found to be beautiful and compelling.

Tartt has a great gift for characters, and the people she created for this book really did seem to come to life.

I very much enjoyed this book and am about to download her third one next.