The Secret History by Donna Tartt

This is a tricky book to review, because the reading experience will far outweigh anything I could possibly say about it.


Richard leaves home to go to a New England college where he joins up with a small class of extremely pretentious students studying Greek. On the first page you learn that they kill one of the students. So much for spoiler alerts!

In retrospect, not much happens in the plot that you do not read about in that first page. But, although that would suggest a very boring read, it was anything but. I was glued to the pages and constantly had to see what was going to happen,  how it was going to happen, why it was going to happen and then what was going to happen next.

The characters in The Secret History are really well fleshed out. In a way, I consider this book to be more of a character study of the students than a plot driven novel. I enjoyed every interaction with them, witnessing their reactions and actions. Although I did find Richard (the narrator) to be rather whiny, I could understand his motivations, although I tend to prefer a more direct, proactive solution. What I did enjoy seeing was how each of them handled the events that occurred in the book. I even found the professor interesting. He was a character that had a lot of influence on the students, even though he did not have a ton of page time.

One thing that I did find interesting is how my feelings towards the characters fluctuated throughout the reading. There were some I admire and ended up fearing, there were those I thought were annoying and ended up liking. Yes, there were some very interesting people in this book. (They felt like people, not characters in a story.)

While I don't think this one might be for everyone, I enjoyed it. I think that folks who have experienced university, especially studying literature or classics, would probably enjoy it more. I also think the expectations one has going into this is important. From the reviews I looked at, many people rated this poorly because they were expecting a typical crime thriller. This is not a crime thriller. It is pretty much anything except a crime thriller.

Overall I rated this 4 stars on Goodreads, although I cannot put into words why I did not give it 5.

This is the 51st book I have read for the 2015 TBR Pile Reading challenge.