Donna Tartt does not disappoint...

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

What can I say that hasn't already been said about this new offering from the author Donna Tartt? At times I found myself reading so slowly, because I didn't want to end, and at times I was falling over the words, eager to find out what was happening. It is a brilliant book, and so skillfully woven together. My favourite review also touches on her other works to date -

"It is dangerous to write openings as compelling as Donna Tartt's. In The Secret History, the one-page prologue gives us a murder and a narrator who has helped to commit it. The Little Friend starts with the death of a child who, by page 15, is found hanging by a piece of rope from a tree branch, his red hair "the only thing about him that was the right colour any more". And now, in The Goldfinch, Tartt has a 50‑page two-part opening. In the first section, the narrator, Theo Decker, is holed up in an Amsterdam hotel, looking at newspapers written in Dutch, which he can't understand; he is searching for his name in articles illustrated with pictures of police cars and crime scene tapes. Before any of this is explained, the story moves back 14 years to the day Theo's mother dies, when he is on the cusp of adolescence. Her death takes place in New York's Metropolitan Museum, as a consequence of an exploding bomb – mother and son are in separate rooms when the bomb blast occurs, and the descriptions of Theo regaining consciousness in the wreckage, and trying to find his way out of the ripped-apart museum before returning home, expecting to find his mother there, are written in astonishingly gripping prose. This is, of course, where the danger comes in: if, at the end of the kind of set piece to which the word "climactic" should emphatically apply, you still have 700 pages to go, aren't you setting your readers up for disappointment?" - Kamila Shamsie -The Guardian, Thursday 17 October 2013

Rightly, the critic's answer is no, and certainly as an avid fan of Tartt's writing, I was excited that there was still so much to follow. There really is so much to Theo's tale, yet it doesn't in any way feel long. In fact I felt was over far too soon and I even tried to ration myself. The closing chapter was so poignant that I sat in silence for a while afterwards just thinking. Rarely you find this. Donna Tartt does not disappoint.