Donna Tartt has a remarkable ability to make me read books that, on paper, you should probably hate.

‘The Secret History’ is a group of insufferable classics students discussing Greek philosophy for hundreds of pages. ‘The Goldfinch’ follows a boy wandering through grief, art, addiction, and bad decisions for nearly 800 pages. It was substantial, too.

So when you pick up ‘The Little Friend’, you think you know what you are getting into. A long Donna Tartt novel isn't usually a problem. This time, though, it is.

The novel opens with one of Tartt’s strongest premises. Nine-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes is found hanging from a tree in his family’s front yard on Mother’s Day. Nobody knows who killed him. Nobody is ever caught. Years later, Robin’s younger sister Harriet becomes convinced she can solve the mystery herself. That's the setup.

The problem is that the book never seems nearly as interested in solving Robin’s murder as Harriet is. Instead, Tartt spends hundreds of pages constructing a world. Harriet's eccentric great-aunts. Her withdrawn mother. Her best friend, Hely. The town. The class divisions. The racial tensions. The criminal Ratliff family. The endless Mississippi summer.

All of it is beautifully rendered.

And yet around the halfway point, there is a recurring question: What exactly is this book about?

Is it a murder mystery? A coming-of-age story? A Southern Gothic novel? A study of grief? A meditation on class? A story about race?

The answer appears to be "all of the above," which unfortunately means none of them ever becomes the clear centre of gravity.

Harriet herself is magnificent. She might be one of Tartt's best creations. She's stubborn, intelligent, reckless, funny, arrogant, imaginative, and completely believable as a twelve-year-old. Many writers can write smart children. Very few can write for children who actually think like children.

She approaches her brother's murder with the confidence of someone too young to understand how little she knows. Watching her stumble through amateur detective work is often fascinating because she's driven less by evidence than by the kind of certainty only children possess.

One thing Tartt does particularly well is resist the temptation to romanticise childhood. Harriet's world is not one of innocence. It is a world filled with neglect, family dysfunction, casual cruelty, and adults who are often too consumed by their own problems to notice what is happening around them.

The novel understands that childhood can be lonely, boring, and frightening in ways that adults often forget. Harriet is not protected from the world's ugliness. She is simply too young to fully understand it. Some of the book's strongest moments come from this tension between what Harriet sees and what she is actually seeing.

The book comes alive whenever she's on the page. Unfortunately, Harriet can't carry the entire novel by herself.

As the story progresses, Tartt begins relying on increasingly unlikely coincidences to move the plot forward. Characters continually drift into one another's paths. Harriet's attempts at revenge somehow intersect with a criminal ecosystem already involving venomous snakes, drug trafficking, and various forms of Southern chaos.

The novel often feels large compared to the story it is telling. Robin's murder provides the initial spark, but Tartt continually pushes outward, introducing new families, histories, conflicts, and perspectives. At times the book feels less like a mystery than an attempt to capture an entire ecosystem. The result is both impressive and irritating. Few writers can make a town feel this alive. Yet the novel's scope often seems at odds with its plot. It is as though Tartt became increasingly fascinated by the world she created and gradually lost interest in the question that brought readers there in the first place.

The snake situation, in particular, becomes almost unintentionally funny. Harriet goes looking for a poisonous snake. Meanwhile, the very people she's investigating are already dealing with poisonous snakes. At some point, you stop wondering who killed Robin and start wondering why everyone in Mississippi apparently has immediate access to deadly reptiles.

The coincidences pile up until they begin to feel less like fate and more like narrative convenience.

Then comes the ending. Or perhaps more accurately, the absence of one.

Every mystery doesn’t necessarily need to be solved. Some of the best novels leave questions unanswered. But after hundreds of pages of buildup, ‘The Little Friend’ arrives at a conclusion that feels less ambiguous than incomplete.

The book simply stops.

Tartt meant to have a haunting effect. But it's just frustrating.

This is especially disappointing because the novel contains so much that works. Tartt remains a phenomenal stylist. Her descriptions are vivid without becoming showy. Her understanding of place is extraordinary. The atmosphere she creates is thick enough to step into.

You can still feel the heat of the Mississippi summer. You can still hear the cicadas. You can still picture Harriet riding her bike through town, convinced she's about to uncover a terrible secret. But atmosphere can only carry a novel so far.

By the end, it felt like you had spent hundreds of pages touring a beautifully constructed house whose front door never opened.

But, reading ‘The Little Friend’ is not a regret. Even a lesser Donna Tartt novel contains more intelligence and craft than most novels ever achieve. But having loved both ‘The Secret History’ and ‘The Goldfinch’, I find this is the first time her book makes you feel that the journey is more impressive than the destination.

It’s a novel filled with memorable characters, stunning prose, and unforgettable scenes. But it just makes you wish it had a story strong enough to hold them all together.

The Little Friend

Author: Donna Tartt

Publisher: Alfred A Knopf

Date: October 22, 2002