Word: harriet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, the 12-year-old heroine of Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, is a bookish girl in small-town Mississippi in the early '70s. So was Tartt. Harriet has dark bobbed hair and an intense stare that unnerves other children and even grownups. Look at Tartt's photo, and compare for yourself. And--not unlike an author gestating a Gothic suspense novel--Harriet is patiently hatching a terrible and ominous plan...
...sprawling story of vengeance, with few wasted words, told in a rich, controlled voice that can come only from long effort, which doesn't show ostentatiously on the page. Like History, it's a murder mystery in which the mystery is secondary. Twelve years before the novel begins, Harriet's 9-year-old brother Robin was found hanged in the backyard. Harriet's family--social pillars who have lost their wealth but not their hauteur--have not healed well. Her father has abandoned the family; her mother has checked out emotionally, leaving Harriet's rearing to the maid...
Robin hovers over Harriet and her older sister like a saint and weighs on them like an anvil: a stained-glass window in their church, dedicated to him, depicts Jesus talking to "a red-haired boy in a baseball cap who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Robin." One summer, Harriet sets out to "solve" his murder. She concludes--through an arbitrary and disastrous hunch--that he was hanged by his playmate Danny Ratliff, now 20, a drug dealer from a trailer-trash family. The penalty: she will kill Danny by getting a poisonous snake to bite...
What follows is an acute examination of amateur justice and its unintended results. If Friend suffers by comparison to History, it is in its familiar eccentric aunts and faded gentry, who infest Southern literature like kudzu. But Harriet is an original. While grownups like Michael Chabon are moonlighting as kids' writers, Tartt has written a grownup book that captures the dark, Lord of the Flies side of childhood and classic children's literature. Harriet is a child, not a pint-size adult or supergirl. (She's Harriet, not Harriet the Spy.) She is smart but not wise, naive...
...doing a bang-up job. The master suites, the bathroom spas, the game rooms, the professional kitchens and the lobby-like great rooms are our way of turning our once humble abodes into luxury hotels. Feel free to put some chocolate on your pillow. --With reporting by Harriet Barovick, Lisa McLaughlin and Desa Philadelphia/New York, Jyl Benson/New Orleans, Leslie Everton Brice/Atlanta, Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines and Sonja Steptoe/Los Angeles