Our Take
The great pleasure of The Goldfinch is how fully it commits to being a big, old fashioned novel. Donna Tartt takes her time, and the payoff is a story that feels lived in, with characters you can almost hear and cities you can almost smell.
Tartt won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this book, and it shows in the prose. Her sentences are rich without being showy, and she moves easily between grief, comedy, and sudden suspense. Theo is not always an easy narrator to root for, but that is part of the draw. The book is interested in how loss shapes a person, and in what we cling to when nothing else holds still. Art, beauty, and obsession run through every section.
If you loved Tartt's earlier novel The Secret History, you will recognize her talent for pulling you into a closed, intense world. Readers who like sprawling emotional epics will also find a lot to love in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. And the Dickensian bones of Theo's journey, from orphaned boy to uneasy adult, echo Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.
This is a book for patient readers who want to disappear into something for a week or two. It is long, and it asks for your attention, but it gives a great deal back. Pick it up when you have a stretch of quiet evenings ahead.
