(Read through CloudLibrary)

“Are you happy here?” I said at last.

I felt a little spoiled when I was reading this book, primarily because thrillers are some of my favorite types of books and I have read some that have twists on every page and then here was The Secret History, starting with the death of a main character, telling you who did it and then rewinding the clock and through the whole book showing us why it happened the way it did.

In that context, it seems fairly understandable to think that I should not be comparing this book to the fast and forgotten triumphs of Dan Brown but more meditative, characteristic journey of people who are friends. Normal teenage people just living life really, attending college, falling in love, studying haha

To me that feels like Harry Potter, Tolstoy, it feels like warmth and love. Don’t get me wrong there is a lot of tension in this book and the characters are for the most part not likeable because they are rich assholes but compelling because of how truly Donna Tartt embraces her characters and lets them be as they are, she lets them run around in circles doing their own little things and because the writing is so good, you engage with their actions and want to follow them wherever they go.

This is a book built on great pacing and rigid structure, there are only eight chapters and they are really big ones. The shortest is like 19 pages and the big ones are 82. What it allows the book to present to the reader is a story told in stages where each stage is a mood, a haze, a drunken splendor of amazing writing and aesthetics that put shame to anything Instagram can create; each stage being able to stand out distinctly meanwhile living cohesive with the others.

That can sometimes backfire and it does, sometimes you have no idea what happened just twenty pages before, only because most of the text feels like you’re in a trance, drunk and moving through the motions of life. That’s probably my only complaint about the book aside from Donna Tartt showcasing large sections that read as Islamophobic but not having the gall to use the word Islam instead using the fiction term isram which is just confusing, especially when one of her principle character’s whole mythology is built around meeting people that actually existed in real life, like George Orwell!

Overall: I really adored the book, the vibe it brings and just how beautiful the writing is. While I understand it feels like not much happens in the story itself, that does not take away much from the book because it was never going to play that card anyway, from the moment we see Bunny falling down that cliff to it’s last sci-fi/afterlife reunion.