Reviews with content warning for Gun violence - The Goldfinch

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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

131 reviews

ewwniamh's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

it took me almost a year to finish this book and although i have some problems with it, i do really have a strong attachment to it and it's characters.

whether that be because of how long it took me to read it or because i actually enjoyed it as much as the secret history, I'm not sure but that last chapter was absolutely incredible so donna tart has got me in a chokehold again for a second time I guess

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nils_0's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious relaxing sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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afk2022's review

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challenging dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I find this a hard book to review largely because it is so big. While reading, it can feel slow, and dense, emotionally straining and frankly, obsessive and excessive in the descriptions of depression, suicide and drug use. I feel like Tartt is pulling all this into s grander narrative though. On one level it is about Theo, a boy who after a simply awful act of God fails to fulfil his potential, makes the wrong friends and enters a dark path, all while seeing others suffer along the way. We stay with Theo through all his downward spiral and bad decisions, and by the end of the novel he hasn’t really turned it around - he just intends to.

On the other hand, it is a novel about love. Love for people and love for concepts, really. It is about how love and care for something bigger than oneself can give one purpose and drive when life is hard, and how this purpose can help motivate you to take the next step. There’s this triangulation of the painting, his mother and Pippa. Theo obesses over all of them. But the painting casts the other two into relief. Theo ends up obsessing and loving the concept of his mother and Pippa, the memory as it were. The painting, arguably more of a concept than the other two, is more real to Theo, and helps him recontextualise his life to view the other two as what they are, concepts and ideas of memory. It’s an interesting way to explore how these “larger” concepts help illuminate the smaller, closer ones in our lives.

As usual with a Tartt novel, sexuality is ambiguous and I’m not sure what to say about that.

This novel isn’t for everyone, and I can see why it has received the criticism it has received to date. However, I do think it is brilliant both in scope and style, and in the way it explores the complexity of life, fate, choice, mortality and love.

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booksandboba's review against another edition

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dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

I can’t give a star/numerical rating to this book because I really don’t know how to describe my feelings.

When I first read it, I loved it, loved the writing style and character development (it was my first or one of my first encounters with writing like this), really related to descriptions of anxiety and depression, considered it my favorite book. Read it a second time and started forming doubts, particularly with noticing issues of classism and racism. Read it a third time, this time annotating heavily for themes present throughout the book (question of fate vs free will, good vs bad and moral responsibility, depression and grief vs hope, art and its beauty and importance, friendship and love, impermanence vs permanence, time, life and death) and enjoyed doing that, but in doing so realized that the book really could have been edited better. I found the ending to be sloppy and not satisfying. And the way that blatant racism is used in the book (equating East Asian and especially Chinese culture and objects with cheapness) is just appalling.

And apparently it took 10 years or more to write this book, which either means that those choices were deliberate and well-thought out, choosing to only have people of color represented in minor roles mostly as working class serving the white upper class, choosing to use racist notions to make character points, or she somehow in all that time failed to consider these choices — why she might be making them, what they mean, what sort of impact they would have — despite the clear time and attention to detail given to making this book.

Maybe you can claim that Theo, as a character, is racist, and that it just adds to the long list of character flaws and why we can’t trust him as a reliable narrator etc., but we already have so many examples so why would this be necessary? The racism does not directly connect to a point that needs to made either for plot or theme as far as I can see, and even if Theo as a character is just racist, that still doesn’t explain why the only people of color we encounter are in working class positions, save maybe the two social workers. (And he can’t even remember the Korean woman’s name, and just has to mention that her breath smells like garlic?)

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marianneiriss's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Should you read The Goldfinch? Yes, but also no:

If you’ve read and enjoyed other long, slow, and at times frustrating books (for example, Crime and Punishment!), you like to read books with entirely unlikeable characters and unreliable narrators, and you don’t mind forays into odd, illogical, trains of thought and extremely long sentences - yes, definitely read The Goldfinch!

If you’ve read and enjoyed The Secret History, and you are hoping for something in the same vein of content/themes from The Goldfinch - I probably wouldn’t recommend it to you, because it’s honestly nothing like TSH, and I think you might be disappointed if you go into expecting it to be similar!

Personally, I thought that although it’s not an easy read, it was worth it. I’ve not been able to stop thinking about The Goldfinch since I finished last month.

I loved the lyrical writing - Donna Tartt has beautiful prose. And she captures this feeling of a kind of resigned despair so well, it pervades the entire book. I actually had to take a bit of a break from reading it at one point just to read something a bit less unhappy (I wouldn’t class this as ‘a sad book’ necessarily, but it is an unhappy book, at times desperately so). I’ve included some content warnings at the end of this review, and I would recommend looking into them before you decide to commit to reading The Goldfinch, as it does deal with heavy subject matter.

All this being said, I did think that it is a fantastic book overall, and if you’re currently battling through it I would recommend sticking with it, as you’ll be glad by the end that you did. Despite how frustrating it feels at times - I certainly felt like yelling at Theo “please, just don’t do that, just don’t” at multiple points! - it is well worth persevering with it.

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rae_kjise's review

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challenging dark emotional informative sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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syd4panda's review

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dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

took me about seven months to read. somewhat of a comfort book during that time, but nothing i'd pick up again. got attached to the characters and learned to love and hate their flaws. despite the art gallery bombing being an experience that (i'm assuming) no reader has gone through as well as being an art thief, theo himself is certainly relatable.

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