This was a book of two halves for me. I read the first 400 pages early in the month and the last 400 pages right at the end. I loved the first half. I thought it was fascinating and fantastic and was almost considering giving this book five stars. But when I came back after taking almost two weeks off from reading (unrelated health reasons), I struggled a lot more. The second half didn't grab me in the same way. I'm not sure how much of it was that the book itself changed (which it did in some ways- I was less interested in the art theft and criminal underworld than just Theo's dysfunctional life) and how much was that I felt disconnected after taking a break from it. It's hard to place blame on the book entirely when I know I prefer reading books in short spans of time.

This is definitely not a book for everyone. It's painfully slow and unnecessarily wordy, but I'm such a sucker for books like that. I love when everything is drawn out and you get every single detail of their lives. This book covered almost twenty years, and so much of that was included. There were only a couple moments that were skipped over, and I was honestly a bit disappointed in those. It could have been longer, which is a little ridiculous to say since it was almost 800 pages long, but it's true.

I did almost give this book three stars, but how much I loved the first half really pushed it up to four stars. The second half dragged a lot for me. I didn't like the main plot of the story. Once it got into the meat of why Donna Tartt was writing this book, I lost interest. The criminal underworld and art theft and con artists didn't interest me. I loved the beginning, which was rather pointless and meandering, but just the story of this kid who lost his mother and didn't have anyone else in the world. That grabbed me. The art aspects not so much.

There were a lot of weird writing style aspects that I didn't mind in the first half but really irritated me in the second. For starters, there was so much dialogue. Just paragraphs and paragraphs of long explanations or inane conversation or backstory. I much prefer more narration in my books. Tartt also included a fair amount in other languages that was rarely translated. It probably wasn't anything important, but I don't enjoy when additional languages are included but not translated. Even if it's just a footnote, I want to know what the random Russian or Dutch or French was. It bugged me not to know.

There were also a lot of things included that didn't make sense in context. Small things mostly, but enough that my suspension of disbelief was constantly questioned. At the beginning of the book, there's a bombing in a museum where the main character is with his mother. The mother dies and the MC survives, injured, and leaves the building. He's 13 years old and manages to walk out past all the first responders and bystanders and media and all the way back to his apartment without being stopped, despite being obviously not right (he's covered in blood from another victim and is obviously concussed). I just don't buy that not one person stopped to help him. It doesn't make sense. Alone it didn't bother me too much, but there were a number of similar things that were just unbelievable enough that it made buying into the story as a whole more difficult.

I found Boris's character annoying. To a degree you were definitely meant to, but I didn't like reading about him and I was always relieved when he left. I think that was me responding to that entire story line with the criminal underworld and art theft. I wasn't interested in that and I liked this book better when it was just a kind of boring account of this kid's unhappy life. I love that kind of boring.

All in all, I did give this a bit of a generous rating. I can see why some people love it and I definitely loved aspects, but it was just too much for me. I'm very excited to read more from Tartt and I recommend this if you like the slowest of slow books that are mostly just dysfunctional dramas. I'm very glad I read it.