Book Reviews
A thinking-person's thriller.... Think Lord of the Flies, then The Rules of Attraction.... The Secret History combines a bit of both—the unmistakable whiff of evil from William Golding's classic and the mad recklessness of priviledged youth from Bret Easton Ellis's novel of the '80s.... As stony and chilling as any Greek tragedian ever plumbed.
New York Newsday
Tartt's voice is unlike that of any of her contemporaries. Her beautiful language, intricate plotting, fascinating characters, and intellectual energy make her debut by far the most interesting work yet from her generation.
Boston Globe
A long tale of friendship, arrogance, and murder knit together with the finesse that many writers will never have.... Her writing bewitches us.... The Secret History is a wonderfully beguiling book, a journey backward to the fierce and heady friendships of our school days, when all of us believed in our power to conjure up divinity and to be forgiven any sin.
Philadelphia Inquirer
One of the best American college novels to come along since John Knowles's A Seperate Peace.... Immensely entertaining.
Houston Chronicle
Donna Tartt is clearly a gifted writer.... The cadence of her sentences, the authority with which she shaped 500-plus pages of an erudite page-turner indicate she has the ability to leave her literary contemporaries standing in the road.... The decision to murder has about it the inevitability of classical Greek tragedy.
Miami Herald
Tartt's much bruited first novel is a huge, rambling story that is sometimes ponderous, sometimes highly entertaining. Part psychological thriller, part chronicle of debauched, wasted youth, it suffers from a basically improbable plot, a fault Tartt often redeems through the bravado of her execution.... [T]he plot's many inconsistencies, the self-indulgent, high-flown references to classic literature and the reliance on melodrama make one wish this had been a tauter, more focused novel. In the final analysis, however, readers may enjoy the pull of a mysterious, richly detailed story told by a talented writer.
Publishers Weekly
This well-written first novel attempts to be several things: a psychological suspense thriller, a satire of collegiate mores and popular culture, and a philosophical bildungsroman. Supposedly brilliant students at a posh Vermont school (Bennington in thin disguise) are involved in two murders.... The book's many allusions, both literary and classical...fail to provide [a] deeper resonance.... Ultimately, it works best as a psychological thriller. —Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, MA
Library Journal
[P]recious, way-too- long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods.... Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking...seems dated, formulaic.
Kirkus Reviews