I just cannot bring myself to be anything but disgusted by these people. I am equally filled with disgust that such a brilliant writer as Donna Tartt is wasting her talents on such terrible plotlines. This sad, sad group of rich sociopaths, plus an obligatory poor person, justify killing a member of their group because he might tell someone that they had committed a murder. Don’t worry, they only murdered a farmer, not Voltaire (their perspective, not mine). Now, I attended a school full of rich kids where I watched a girl self-identify as poor and then cry into her Free People skirt and then pull tissues from her Coach purse. Where I’m from, poor people don’t even have knockoff Coach purses, they have malnutrition. I was so disgusted by the environment of this school that I transferred. So it was not an enjoyable experience reading about an environment that I had fled. And maybe that’s why I just could not identify with these characters, because not even Richard was poor, though he acted like it. Perhaps Donna Tartt was just trying to challenge herself and her abilities by making people like such unlikable nerds, and she has succeeded if taking a trip through the Secret History tag on Tumblr is any indication. What concerns me is her negligible respect for actual Greek history. The history in this book is just downright false, which only a Classics major (guilty as charged) would understand. So her readers are simply lapping up these characters without realizing that they are actually really, really stupid. Their one claim to fame, intellect, which they lord over the masses, is actually a lie. At one point, Henry actually insinuates that the Greeks did not like the sea, which is absolute bullsh*t (I don’t have Tartt’s gift for eloquence). Very little of the Greek mainland is actually travellable, so they had to use the sea. This was actually the only clue that they were bad Classics scholars that the common reader might have picked up on when in actuality there are many other nuanced things that are just incorrect. For example, their Greek translations are bad. This was one of many reasons that I had to throw this book down multiple times. The other reasons mostly have to do with the fact that the characters were snotty rich snobs with no concern for human life or different social strata. And if there’s anything that I can’t stand more than rich snobs, it’s rich snobs who think they’re poor, so this was not the book for me. The three stars are awarded simply on the fact that Donna Tartt is an actual genius with words, which is the only thing that kept me going until the end of this Greek tragedy.