BOOK REVIEW: THE SECRET HISTORY BY DONNA TARTT

me waiting for literally anything that's even remotely interesting to happen in this book 

With super hyped books like The Secret History, I'm usually wary, to say the least. I've disliked many a hyped book, so I knew there was a chance I wouldn't like this. Regardless, I went into it hoping for the best because I liked the premise and the general subject matter (universities! murder! academia!). And WOW was I disappointed as hell. 

This book was aggressively underwhelming; I cannot stress this enough. Okay, so, listen, a lot of the times I'll read a book that everyone loved and I'll think I didn't really like this, but I can totally understand why other people would. This was decidedly not the case for The Secret History. I DON'T GET IT. I just don't. What do people like about this book exactly?The characters? They're pieces of shit—no doubt about that. And not even in a omg i love to hate them!!!!!! kind of way either. They're just straight up assholes. And this is not to mention the fact that they're completely underdeveloped. Everything in this dumb book is cloaked in so many layers of convoluted suspense and drama that I couldn't parse out who the hell these characters were. Everyone was so ridiculously shady and dodgy all the time—it got realirritating real fast. And out of the 7 main characters of this book, literally only one (1) of them was female, and surprise surprise she barely had any scenes. She was just the ethereal, beautiful presence that Richard occasionally lost his shit over. (At one point he thinks, "I felt a fierce, nearly irresistible desire to seize Camilla by her bruised wrist, twist her arm behind her back until she cried out, throw her on my bed: strangle her, rape her, I don't know what." what the actual fuck.) (oh also, check out this description of her lol: "Camilla looked enchanting. She wore a narrow sleeveless dress, salmon-colored, which exposed a pair of pretty collarbones and the sweet frail vertebrae at the base of her neck—lovely kneecaps, lovely ankles, lovely bare, strong-muscled legs." richard, chill, pls. lovely kneecaps? really?) And I know, I know, the characters are supposed to be unlikable silly, that's the whole point! But there's a fine line between unlikable/abrasive but still sympathetic, or at least understandable, and unbearably shitty. Needless to say, this book crossed that line, for me at least. It felt like Tartt was just like look at these asshole characters! how dark, right? they committed murder and they're assholes and they're in university! doesn't this make the book so dark and suspenseful! No.

Ok, so clearly I didn't warm up to the characters. What about the plot? That could've at least made up for what the characters lacked, right? lol, no. First of all, WHAT PLOT? This book basically had no plot, or at least a very, very elementary one. I kept expecting something shocking to happen and wow me, but it never came. And what made the plot even worse is that it was SO DAMN DRAWN OUT. Like I gotta give Tartt props for stretching out a plot that was basically nonexistent into a 560-page book. Holy hell. Everything took ssssoooooo loooongggggg to happen. Just pages and pages and pages devoted to characters doing drugs and taking pills and getting drunk and just making dumbass phonecalls. Henry calls Richard, Richard visits Francis, Charles calls Richard who finds Francis at Henry's, Francis is at Richard's calling Charles—seemingly endless combinations of scenes like this just drove me crazy omg. I'd initially thought this book was a mystery, but it's really not. There is no mystery; you know exactly what's gonna happen from page one. 

So the characters sucked, ditto for the plot, so that leaves...what? Nothing, really; I liked nothing about this book. The writing was stilted and dry, lacking any kind of vitality. I could not care less about the esoteric discussions of Classics and ancient Greek. I can honestly say that I didn't enjoy a single thing about this book.

So, uh, those are pretty much all my thoughts.