Books

Hey Peeps,

Can you imagine that I’m reading a book at the moment in which I am so immersed that New Years Eve was happening outside and that I was so focused on reading that at 10 pm I looked up from the lines the first time? Hearing all these fireworks cracking and popping outside and seeing them illuminating the dark sky. Ohhh, I thought. That’s different from the books I usually read, so I thought I could share it with you.

It’s Donna Tartt’s second book called “The Little Friend” which was published in 2002. It’s a bit gloomy but sooo captivating. Tartt is such a genius in describing the whole stimmung and setting of a scene that you actually think YOU are part of it. That’s because she so vividly introduces her characters and the conversations they are having that you SEE the scenes happening directly in front of your eyes. You feel you are exactly in Mississippi. You feel like “Oh, nooo, that’s not fair that Harriet is doing this. That’s sooo mean.” But at the same time you still like her. She writes lines like this:

Harriet walked home in the drizzle with her head down, under a gigantic borrowed umbrella of Edie’s which – when she was smaller – she had used to play Marry Poppins. Water sang in the gutters; long tows of orange day lilies, beaten down by the rain, leaned towards the sidewalk at frenetic angles as if to shout at her. She half-expected Hely to run up splashing through the puddles in his yellow slicker; she was determined to ignore him if he did, but the steamy streets were empty: no people, no cars. Since there was no one around to prevent her from playing in the rain, she hopped ostentatiously from puddle to puddle. Were she and Hely not speaking?”

So, I haven’t finished the book yet. But in short this is what’s it about: The Cleve family found one of their 3 children, Robin, hanging by neck in a tree of their own backyard when he was nine years old. The whole family was in the house when it happened and his little sister Harriet – at the afternoon when it happened – still a baby sleeping on the porch. Eleven years after the murder the situation still is pretty much the same: The murderer still walks around as a free person and nobody has ever caught him. So, out of bore and because Harriet finds it strange that nobody in her family would say a word about that day when her brother was killed, as the youngest children of the Cleves, Harriet decides to find and punish the murderer. Apparently a lot of people say that Tartt’s second novella is her weakest but I couldn’t quite agree with that.

Ahhh, and now I’m going back to read. Can’t wait. Check out the book and please let me know whether you like it!!!