What better way to end a crappy day than finish reading a crappy book.

Everybody, this is Quartz's book review / rant of the day.

The book I'm talking about is Donna Tartt's The Little Friend. If you haven't read it and are planning to, you might wanna skip this post as I am going to tell you the ending and what it means.

Synopsis : Robin was found hung with some electric wire on a tree, at age 9. The killer has never been found and there was never any suspect. Something like 10 years later, his sister Harriet, now 12 years, a baby at the time of the murder, decides she is going to find the murderer.

She investigates and from comments she gathers, she finds Danny Ratliff, the same age as Robin's, has killed her brother. She decides to kill him.

Then the story takes a wild turn, as we are told the very detailed story of the Ratliff family, which is filled with prison, murders and drugs. Nothing about Harriet's family though. For 450 pages.

Background info : I'm a fast reader. My mother used to buy me several small books for Christmas, which I read in less than a month. Now she buys me three or four big books. I read this one in about 4 weeks, which is a lot for me. Let's keep going.

So we have two parallel stories here, the Cleve's (Harriet's family) and the Ratliff's. And everything seems to indicate that there is a link between the two of them, but nothing is mentionned that would confirm that, until Danny Ratliff, convinced Harriet is after them because of the drugs they're hiding nearby, finds out who she is and remembers he was friends with Robin, what a great kid he was, and how they both loved Spiderman and Batman. Nothing else.

It ends Harriet nearly kills Danny Ratliff, and suddenly it seems she has a "crisis". She's hospitalized, and they find out she suffers from epilepsy. While at the hospital, Harriet hears Danny and Robin were friends, and maybe it wasn't him who killed her brother after all.

Then some adults say that Harriet being epileptic "explains a lot". And then the book ends.

We are left with many questions :
a) who fucking killed Robin, damn it ???
b) all throughout, Harriet's older sister, Allison, who was there when Robin died and crying right before they found him, seems to have weird dreams and stuff. Everything makes us believe she knows something.
Well... does she ? does she not ? We'll never know. 'Cuz Tartt won't tell us.
c) Harriet has a friend all throughout the story, Hely. However, at the end of the summer, they drift away. Hely makes other friends and well... you know how it happens. At the end, though, they seem to reconnect a bit, but we have still no clue whether or not they're still friends.
d) we know Danny Ratliff gets arrested for the murder of his brother Farish, murder we witnessed through the author's pen. But what happens to him after that ?

The story is filled with unimportant facts. A cat dies. Harriet tries to save a bird and tears out its wing. A great-aunt dies. Harriet goes to summer camp. And all this has NOTHING TO DO with the story.

SO. After such an unsatisfying ending, I went searching around for answers.

You know what ? Robin wasn't killed after all. He was probably epileptic like Harriet. He was playing with the wire (we know the neighbor was throwing junk away that very day, don't wonder where he got the wire from) in a tree (Spiderman, remember ?), and then got seizures and hung himself accidentally. And died.

That stuff is genetic, right ?
So Harriet's epileptic too. That does "explain a lot". Especially since everybody refers to Robin's "murder" as "the accident". So everybody knows it's an accident, but from the book's time table, it seems epilepsy is still viewed as evil, kinda. So nobody speaks about it. Though we have no way of knowing WHEN the damn story takes place.

So yeah. That was crap.