Review for "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt

"It's a shame. I feel bad about it."

"Well, of course, I do too," said Henry matter-of-factly. "But of course not bad enough to want to go to jail for it."

Francis snorted and poured himself another shot of whiskey and drank it straight off. "No," he said. "Not that bad." 



Rating: 3 stars

Normally, the quote I include in my review wouldn't be dialogue like that, but I think it really sums up the book pretty well. 6 college students that spend a lot of time together end up in trouble when a wild night ends in a mistake that pushes the boundaries of their moral conscience. Now it comes down to what they will do to keep it a secret. This book really deals with the concepts of guilt, trust, and responsibility--or maybe I should say an absence of all three.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness. 

It becomes obvious early on that this is meant to be a character-driven novel. You're given 6 main characters who are caught up in the same situation (which moves very slowly but more on that later). The thing is, for such a heavily character-based novel, I didn't find the characters that compelling. I didn't see a lot of personality in them. The most interesting personalities in the book were Julian and Judy, who are supporting and minors characters respectively. I feel like the author relied too much on Francis's sexuality to create his personality, and on the telling-not-showing method of portraying Henry's character. I've heard that this is a book with very unlikable characters. I disagree. Sure, they're rich and spoiled and they did something really awful and illegal without much remorse (see above quote) so that's pretty bad, but I was never super frustrated or annoyed with them like you should be with unlikable characters. In a way, I feel like if they had been really unlikable, I would've liked the book better because the characters would've had more personality.

This brings me onto the topic of the plot. Like I said, it's a character-driven novel, but I tend to be a plot-driven reader. And honestly, the plot is really intriguing... for the first 2/3 of the book. And then it's just like NOTHING IS HAPPENING. They drag out a certain scene into like 80 pages, but the entirety of it is the characters drinking and doing various drugs and talking about how they're drinking and doing various drugs. I just had a hard time finally getting to the end of the novel. I was like seriously just end already. I think I know why I felt this way about the novel. Someone told me that this book is like How to Get Away with Murder, and I love that show. It's super intriguing and there's a new plot twist added into every single episode. This one... is like if How to Get Away with Murder was actually realistic. Which is good because it gives it a major plausibility factor, but unfortunately it's also much less captivating. If you go into the book thinking about it being similar to the TV show, you will be disappointed with how little seems to be happening. I did definitely see parallels between the book and the show, but I'd read the book before the TV show or you will probably think it's boring. That being said, if you really loved this book you should definitely watch HTGAWM because it is amazing.

So yeah, this book gets 3 stars from me. I like the concept, and I did like some of the characters and their interactions. But the book was too slow and the characters were not quite as compelling as they should have been for a character-driven novel. I read this as a part of the Fox Book Club Big Book Challenge, so thank you Emily for organizing that; I had a good time reading this one!