Books are a wonderful way for coworkers and friends to share experiences, even when we’re miles, states, and countries apart. Hearing about what someone is reading is like taking a 5-minute vacation. Each week, one Piper team member will answer the question, “What are you reading?” and take you on a well-deserved, 5-minute vacation.

This week Christina is reading The Little Friend by Donna Tartt.

“…but what starts as childish imaginary play takes a turn into a frightening reality.”

CHRISTINA SAYS…

After finishing The Secret History, I jumped right into Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend. Both books start with a murder that haunts the rest of the story, but aside from Tartt’s tight writing, the stories are worlds apart. In The Little Friend, nine-year-old Robin Dufresnes is killed, and it breaks the main character’s world wide open. Twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes is obsessed with her brother’s unsolved murder. Determined to find his killer, Harriet spends part of the summer playing detective, but what starts as childish imaginary play takes a turn into a frightening reality. She charges out into her strange but dull Southern town and begins to uncover a series of sordid happenings that would terrify most adults. Harriet is strong willed and independent, but most importantly, she is guided by kid logic, which winds up being both her curse and her saving grace.

AMAZON DESCRIPTION

The second novel by Donna Tartt, bestselling author of The Goldfinch (winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize), The Little Friend is a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.

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.

HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK?

Tell Christina what you thought in the blog comments below!