The Little Friend - Audio CD - Abridged Author:Donna Tartt, Donna Tartt (Narrator) In a small Mississippi town, Harriet Cleve Dusfresnes grows up in the shadow of her brother, who -- when she was only a baby -- was found hanging dead from a black-tupelo tree in their yard. His killer was never identified, nor has his family, in the years since, recovered from the tragedy. — For Harriet, who has grown up largely unsupervised, in... more » a world of her own imagination, her brother is a link to a glorious past she has only heard stories about or glimpsed in photograph albums. Fiercely determined, precocious far beyond her twelve years, and steeped in the adventurous literature of Stevenson, Kipling, and Conan Doyle, she resolves, one summer, to solve the murder and exact her revenge. Harriet’s sole ally in this quest, her friend Hely, is devoted to her, but what they soon encounter has nothing to do with child’s play: it is dark, adult, and all too menacing.
Audio Review:
During the last summer of her childhood, Harriet CleveDufresne resolves to find out the answer to the biggest question in her young life: Who hanged her brother dead from a tupelo tree in the front yard when she was just a baby--and why? At first, it sounds as if Donna Tartt's decision to narrate her long-awaited second novel might not have been a good one; her complex writerly sentences demand narrative expertise for her story to sound told rather than read. But in the end, she won over this listener--not just with the charm and appropriateness of her Mississippi accent and intonation--but with the deep affection she gives to a full spectrum of contemporary Southern characters: eccentric middle-class whites, steeped in family mythology of times passed and still mourning the loss of gentility; the working-class blacks whose lives are intertwined with them in complex economic and personal relationships; and dope-dealing, trailer-living rednecks, as resentful and up to no good as any of Faulkner's poor white trash. Tartt narrates as if she's known these people all he rlife. Her portrayal of Harriet--fierce, precocious, bookish and as likable as Scout Finch--is especially apt. -- AudioFile