Reviews with content warning for Physical abuse - The Secret History

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The Secret History by Donna Tartt

360 reviews

violetdisposition's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This book started out pretty slow but there were enough odd details woven into the elaborately detailed yet rather mundane descriptions of daily life at a liberal arts college to keep me engaged - once things slowly started to reveal themselves, I was eager to see how all of the threads would come together. Even now, I think I would need to reread the book in order to truly capture all of the details and foreshadowing left in each scene. I don't know if I would say I particularly *liked* the main cast of characters - but they had such a charm to them that I was curious to know them better. The narrator is clearly unreliable, and even says so himself, which is my favorite type of narrator - we KNOW he is romanticizing his past and was even romanticizing it when he was living in the moment, and yet his narration is all we have with which to piece the true story together. I would be remiss to mention this book is (over)written with achingly pretentious and flowery language, but I am known to love this type of writing.

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sam_rm94's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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lisa_m's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book was definitely something. It was way longer than I expected it to be and also quite slow paced but for some reason I still could not put it down. I read it in pretty much a day. It was kind of like a train crash you can't look away from but not because it's bad, just because it's so insane.

The story gets told to us by Richard who is the new guy and through whom we get to know the other protagonists. The setting and the whole group of strange classics students is very intriguing and you just want to know more about them. But as the story continues their behaviour becomes stranger and stranger.

So much is happening that I don't even know how to properly summarise my thoughts on this book. I think the easiest would be to talk about each character individually:

- Bunny:

I have to say that I did not like Bunny. I did not like any of the characters really but they still intruiged me. Bunny though is pretty much the exact person I would hate to be confronted with in reallife. He is manipulative, selfish, elitist and very prejudiced. We find out right in the beginning that by the end of the story, he will be dead and I can't say I was very unhappy about that. He is the first one who actually talks to Richard and includes him but after that good first impression it pretty much just went downhill. I feel bad for him, not just because of his family and upbringing but also because he was murdered by his best friends. I wish we got to read the message he left for Julian in full. He seemed so desperate and scared (and for good reason) After all the bad things he said and did, it humanised him to me again.

- Richard:

He is new and wants to fit in with the others in the group very badly. He is a very morally grey person. As a reader we are automatically sympathetic to him because we learn about everything from his perspective. Still I do not like him.

- Camilla and Charles:

I can only talk about the twins as a pair. Honestly for the majority of the book they were my favourites. Yes they were complicated and also involved in the insanity going on but they were kind and very welcoming to Richard. At least to me the further development of their characters was very surprising. Charles goes completely off the rails and I can't fully merge the kind Charles we get to know in the beginning with the reckless driver-sleeps with and abuses his sister-alcoholic-irrational-tries to shoot someone with a gun-Charles he is towards the end. Camilla was also quite different when I first read about her. To me she was a sort of Artemis figure like how she is described during the Bacchanal. I didn't like how later in the book instead of developing her character individually she just becomes this romantasised love-interest to pretty much everyone except Francis. I didn't like that she was just depicted as this callous woman who likes making people fall in love with her. I also don't believe she was actually in love with Henry. He rescued her from a terrible situation but I don't think he is capable of love. I think he was obsessed with her and very much liked to possess her and she knew that too.
The incestuous relationship between the twins was teased a couple of times but even though I was supicious of it I liked them too much to actually think it was happening. When they kissed in front of Richard I was very shocked. But even more so when Camilla tells him that she is scared of Charles and that he abuses her. I saw that coming even less with how close they seemed to be.

- Francis:

I felt quite bad for Francis a lot of the times. Not only was one of his best friends a raging homophobe who he can't even be alone with for that reason, the boy he actually likes pretends nothing is happening between them and prefers to sleep with his own sister. He is also so stressed about everything happening he has a panic attack and later tries to kill himself. Still through all of that he is not a good person either. (None of them are).

- Henry:

Oh Henry. He's a complicated one. I was very intruiged by him in the beginning as well. He was my second favourite after the twins. Not only is he very generous he's also very focused on his studies which seem to be everything to him. He's clearly very intelligent but in the beginning you don't see that as a bad thing. The more the story continued though, the more I started to doubt him. Many things about him never get explained. He clearly is a psychopath and a very dangerous one too. He's the only one who actually kills anyone. The others were just there and so loyal to him they didn't turn him in. I don't think I will ever fully understand him. Did he leave the plane tickets out for Richard to find? It seems like a stupid oversight that's very unlike Henry. I think he wanted Richard to know. I don't understand why he killed himself. Did he really think he would survive? I don't think it was because of anything like remorse. What was the actual relationship between Henry and Julian? It was way closer than between Julian and the other students but we never find out.
I'm also very curious if Henry would have continued killing if he hadn't died. I really think he would have. He said himself that he enjoyed it and he was the one doing the actual killing. Also even though he denies it I am convinced he tried to kill Charles too. Charles may have been a bit irrational but I think he was very justified and correct in being scared of Henry and what he might do to him.
Henry for a majority of the book had control over the group. He's the one who makes decision and tells them what to do. He tells Richard about everything. The biggest warning sign was when he poisoned his neighbors dogs to to try out the poison with which he wanted to kill Bunny. Thats psychopath 101

- Julian:

I expected Julian to not only play a more important role in the story but also just to show up more. Except for being the one who chose every student individually he doesn't really have much to do with the story. Unless of course there is something we don't know. Henry looked up to him very much and he's the one who came up with the idea for the Bacchanal. So what if the idea was actually Julians? That would perhaps explain why he ran and cut contact with them all. Julian is definitely a very strange character. He's not a good person either but we don't actually know how much of an influence he had on his students. He isolated them and made them rely solely on him and each other. I wish we got a few more answers about him and his perspective and intentions.

Okay now that we went through all the main characters let's move on to some theories and thoughts I had while reading.

1. I think it was Richard and Francis who are driving together in a car when they have to stop and they see something that is neither a deer nor a dog and they say it's a big cat. As soon as I read this part I was CONVINCED it would turn out that this big cat was the one who killed the farmer. Wouldn't that have been a twist? If shortly after they kill Bunny it turns out they aren't responsible for the first murder? That they just murdered their friend for nothing? I really thought that would happen, but sadly it did not.

2. I think it's so insane how pretty much the entire group is in some kind of big love triangle. Henry and Camilla, Camilla and Charles, Charles and Francis, Francis and Richard, Richard and Camilla. The only one uninvolved was Bunny and he would be SHOCKED if he ever found out about all this.

3. As much as I did not like Bunny, he had the only understandable reaction to murder. He found his best friends drenched in blood after having killed a man in their delirium. It makes sense that he cannot just move on.

4. I think we never got the full truth about what really happened during the Bacchanal. We only heard Henry's account of it and he clearly only told Richard what he wanted him to know. I wish we got different perspectives on it. I'm not sure I trust anything Henry is saying actually. The whole thing intruiges me but we never get any real answers.

I'm not sure if this is actually a review or just me rambling and venting my thoughts on this book but oh well. I had a couple of issue but all in all I understand why this book is seen as the classic example for Dark Acadmia. It's a bunch of rich, pretentious and educated people trying to rationalise murder. I don't even know what more to say. If you like Dark Academia you will probably like this.

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laurenernst's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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forbidden_sushi's review against another edition

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challenging tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

All the characters remained likable or at the least understandable in some way despite being extraordinarily flawed, and gradually seeing through the cracks in everyone’s facades (including Richard himself) was one of the most interesting things about the book.

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