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From the acclaimed author of The Whiskey Rebels and A Conspiracy of Paper comes a superb new historical thriller set in the splendor and squalor of eighteenth-century London. In Benjamin Weaver, David Liss has created one of fiction’s most enthralling characters. "Liss keeps the suspense at full boil and the action rolling swiftly ahead."
July 3rd, 2009
My goal, of course, is to keep the hundreds of thousands of you who follow my blog up to date with my reading, but since this is the first time I’ve posted book reviews, I think it best to establish that I am not going to review everything I read. Much of what I read is for research, and so boring that even mentioning the titles could harm you. I spend a lot of my reading time with manuscripts and galleys, offering up advance comments and giving back to the writerly community that has given so much to me. And finally, I won’t post bad reviews of fiction, and I will only post bad reviews of non-fiction if there is something about it that pisses me off. So, the bottom line is that I will mostly be telling you about the book I like. Also, if you are strapped for cash, make sure you ignore my recommendations and instead buy The Devil’s Company (on sale July 7th!) and The Whiskey Rebels (now in paperback!). It’s important to prioritize.
The Little Friend is, ostensibly, about a precocious and damaged 12-year-old girl who sets out to uncover the mystery of her brother’s brutal murder, which happened when she was an infant. It is not a mystery novel, however, and readers in search of hard-core plot resolution will almost certainly be disappointed. Rather than focus on who done it, Tartt concerns herself with a couple of very differently messed up families and the stories people tell themselves to understand their own lives. Make no mistake, this is a compelling, page-turning, suspenseful novel. It just doesn’t go for the easy answers. And to cover some things I’ve already read but deserve mention…. |