I’ve been describing this book to my friends as “How to Get Away With Murder, but without Viola Davis.” Except, I’ve never actually watched How to Get Away With Murder, so I don’t think that’s accurate in the slightest. In any case, simply put this book is like a reverse who-dun-it: as in, we know that a group of students murdered one of their classmates right from the get-go, we just aren’t clear as to why or how this came to be. The Secret History […]
“All those layers of silence upon silence.”
My main complaint about the other Donna Tartt book that I recently read — The Goldfinch — boiled down to it simply being too long. The Secret History is similarly long, and dense, and full of rambling descriptions and actions, but I found the story and the characters so much more compelling here. “Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I […]
Eh.
Oh, sweet mercy. What am I supposed to say about this book? My sister and my friend F both read it last year or so. My sister LOVED it, and F was “meh” on it. Basically, I’ve heard you either love it or hate. And spoiler alert: I did not love it. I felt like there two different novels jammed into one. Theo Decker goes to the art museum with his mother, when an explosion kills her but leaves him miraculously alive. While trying to […]
Really only about 10% of this has to do with the damn painting
Wow, this book was long. And it took a long time to read — even long books don’t usually take me more than a few evenings and I feel like I spent two damn weeks with this one. And while I enjoyed it most of it, I feel like it 1. Could have been a hell of a lot shorter without affecting things too much and 2. Was not really what I expected (much more teenage angst, much less art-related heists). “You can look at […]
Read the first half, put the second half off until you can’t sleep
Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch follows Theo Decker, a 13‑year‑old boy living in New York who survives a terrorist attack at the Met that kills his mother. When Theo awakes from the attack, he provides companionship to a dying man, who gives him cryptic instructions, and, when leaving the scene of the attack, Theo steals the beautiful painting The Goldfinch. The novel follows Theo as he is taken in by a wealthy friend, then sent to the Las Vegas suburbs to live with his good‑for‑nothing father, […]
If You Love Something, Set It Free. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
What does it mean to love something? Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is mostly about love and what we will do to have it, in all it’s many manifestations. This story is not about right or wrong, good choices or bad, at it’s heart, The Goldfinch is about what we will do to hold near the things we love. The Goldfinch is a wild (though sometimes overlong) ride through a life of frivolous delinquency, unintentional criminality, lapses in honesty, breaches of ethics, and misunderstood attractions. For Theo Decker, there is no thing so […]