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A review by arielleslibrarycard
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
This book is about a group of young, bright academics (misfits) who attempt to transcend limitations & boundaries set by society (particularly high society) and culture in terms of how they are supposed to think and act; but in their pursuit of living as freely as possible, they find themselves blurring morality and crossing a point of no return.
The blueprint of dark academia, indeed — the tone is eerie and gets more and more sinister as the story goes on, with a lot of literary and philosophical references throughout. Albeit pretentious and snobbish in its writing, but this added to its brilliance as it is told from the first person POV of Richard, who IS a pretentious young man desperately longing to belong to this group of rich kids; but often still finds himself discontented.
A central theme in this book is looking at others / life with a rose-colored lens, where we only accept what is good and beautiful but disregard those that don’t serve us no matter how truthful it is. Funnily, even I found myself initially ignoring how terrible the characters were to the core as I was truly captured by the writing style — how they were described, their “solid friendship”, their lifestyle, and even their intelligence. I found myself thinking “maybe they’re not as bad as they seem to be”, but as the story unravels, the more we see Richard’s rose-colored lenses are fading, and the reality of how despicable and self-absorbed all these characters truly are. There is no friendship, there is no loyalty, there is no love. Self-preservation at its finest, and that hits so hard.
It was a slow start and the chapters were very long. This is definitely a read that requires concentration and brain power. I struggled with keeping up at first, but when I hit 60% onwards, I could not put the book down. Plus points to the author for connecting all the philosophical concepts at the beginning to the events that unfolded in the end. I also couldn’t 100% predict the ending, which kept me on the edge of my seat, as well.
There is so much more to say about this book and its characters — definitely a great read for class or book club discussions.
The blueprint of dark academia, indeed — the tone is eerie and gets more and more sinister as the story goes on, with a lot of literary and philosophical references throughout. Albeit pretentious and snobbish in its writing, but this added to its brilliance as it is told from the first person POV of Richard, who IS a pretentious young man desperately longing to belong to this group of rich kids; but often still finds himself discontented.
A central theme in this book is looking at others / life with a rose-colored lens, where we only accept what is good and beautiful but disregard those that don’t serve us no matter how truthful it is. Funnily, even I found myself initially ignoring how terrible the characters were to the core as I was truly captured by the writing style — how they were described, their “solid friendship”, their lifestyle, and even their intelligence. I found myself thinking “maybe they’re not as bad as they seem to be”, but as the story unravels, the more we see Richard’s rose-colored lenses are fading, and the reality of how despicable and self-absorbed all these characters truly are. There is no friendship, there is no loyalty, there is no love. Self-preservation at its finest, and that hits so hard.
It was a slow start and the chapters were very long. This is definitely a read that requires concentration and brain power. I struggled with keeping up at first, but when I hit 60% onwards, I could not put the book down. Plus points to the author for connecting all the philosophical concepts at the beginning to the events that unfolded in the end. I also couldn’t 100% predict the ending, which kept me on the edge of my seat, as well.
There is so much more to say about this book and its characters — definitely a great read for class or book club discussions.