This is probably at this point somewhat expectedly unconventional. Tartt doesn’t really seem interested in picking a lane and staying in it. I’m not sad about it.

Harriet, the daughter of a grief stricken mother in the south, has grown up to be a self-sufficient, determined kid that is beyond her years in maturity and brains. But, just like her mother and people who directly knew her murdered 9-year old brother—culprit unfound—she’s somewhat stuck in time in other ways.

From the focal point of this unresolved trauma, Tartt launches an unusual coming-of-age story that mirrors Harriet’s ever changing interests and feelings toward life. When she is obsessed with solving the crime, which ranges in her mind, mostly in dreams, the story adopts mystery, crime aspects. When Harriett views the adults around her in insightful ways that she internalizes, there’s shades of To Kill A Mockingbird’s Scout (I think that’s the kid’s name?) qualities being annunciated. She’s scrappy, plays with boys, reads a lot, shaping her worldview from the stories she consumes.

Because Atticus is not there. Her mother is physically present, but otherwise, a pale version of herself. There is a push-pull of tradition and entropy versus the inevitability of change in those that live. All else withers and ends in a kind of cage or prison of their own making in town. Harriett has to try and discern, essentially alone, who she wants to be - while understanding, simply by virtue of being “new” in her being a child, how not to end up like the adults around her. Their racist and prejudiced and stuck in their ways. rather than deal with everything hindering them, especially the grief of the community and those closest to her brother when he died, they continue to ineffectually harm everyone they know and love in often selfish and boorish ways; exemplifying and manifesting the absolute opposite of the values and virtues southerners give mouth service, but undermine with their own actions.

Add to that Tartt’s exceptional specificity and deftness at painting a scene and making a text so rich you fall into it, and you have a strange book that is more complex and in some ways better written than The Secret History. Especially love that the structure and form, as well as multiple genre bending that occurs, as Harriett sort of tries on these aspects of herself as the story progresses. It makes a lot of sense for a story about a child, especially one so concerned with fiction to construct her reality in the formative years of her life. Every character and location is vivid and often raw.

It’s quite dark, but not so much always gothic in a southern way. More so in its treatment of the coming-of-age, loss of innocence, by way of every character we come upon and the ability to treat Harriett as someone who, come what may, will see the greyer shades within her black-and-white world despite her also wishing to return to a time when her mother was a mother and her brother was alive. Even as a child she is precariously close to being another adult trapped in a cycle that feeds their most horrible traits, constantly chasing their own tales and rutting in the mud.