Just Finished Reading The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

Back in 2014 I read my first Donna Tartt novel, The Goldfinch...here's a link to my review on this blog: [Goldfinch].  Set in rural Mississippi some 40-50 years ago, a twelve-year old girl, Harriet Defresnes, lives in a dysfunctional family with the absentee father supporting the family from his job in Tennessee and the mother in a chronic state of emotional collapse following the unsolved hanging death of her son Robin twelve years earlier, when his sister Harriet was just an infant.  Harriet has an older sister Allison who was nearby when Robin was killed but has wiped out all memories of that time.  Harriet, with a blunt and forward personality, is determined to discover Robin's killer and suspects another boy, Danny Ratliff...from a criminally-dysfunctional family, and sets out to sabotage his life.  In the absence of involved parents, the Defresnes sisters are instead ruled by their strong-willed grandmother and their maid Ida Rhew.  Harriet takes on as friend and detective partner little Hely Hull, whose older brother was a pal of Robin's.  There, I've laid out the framework of main characters...I'll leave it to you, the potential reader of this book, to discovers how their adventures play out...

The Little Friend is told from the perspective of various characters, mainly Harriet and her nemesis Danny.  Tartt delves deeply into their personalities and reasoning as they stumble through their days making one mistake after another.  Although Danny Ratliff has a violent streak, it isn't difficult to sympathize with his plight of being stuck within a horrible family that runs a meth business and whose brothers (and himself as well) spend a great percentage of their existence in prison.  I was disappointed in how the novel ended...it's as if the author had some things to get off her chest and, once she felt satisfied that she adequately expressed them through her characters and the story, there was nothing left to do except to end it.  There were several loose ends and clues that Tartt had laid out in her story to tantalize the reader into speculation but which were simply left to wallow...no, I was not happy with the conclusion...

I preferred The Goldfinch to The Little Friend, but the latter still has a great deal to offer the reader...most particularly a great insight into how adults tend to belittle and overlook the legitimate concerns that children try to express to them as well as how much people's personal narratives about their past can hinder their present and even eventually bring about their downfall.  More than anything, though, The Little Friend is a story that leads the reader into a certain direction but, over the course of the book, changes the emphasis to that of something essentially different.  In this sense it reminded me more of Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine, another tale of childhood personal crisis.  Five and a half years is too long a time to go between Donna Tartt novels...I think I'll look into the rest of this insightful and talented author's writings...