“The Secret History”
It is easy to see things in retrospect. but I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees ….
While J.D. Salinger revealed the tortured soul of a teenager in an exclusive private school in Catcher in the Rye, it is Donna Tartt who opens our eyes to young adulthood when she takes the reader into the underworld of a small liberal arts college in The Secret History. Published in 1992, 41 years after Catcher in the Rye, The Secret History tells the story of six young adults at a liberal arts college (the fictional Hampden College in Vermont – not unlike the college Tartt attended: Bennington College in Vermont): Read more 
“The Little Friend”
…it was Christmas, there was a new baby in the house, everybody was happy and thought they would be happy forever.
Harriet Cleve Dufresnes had just entered the world as the third child of Charlotte and Dixon Cleve. Four months later, while baby Harriett was strapped in her swing on the front porch with her 4-year old sister, Allison playing nearby, 9-year old Robin was found hung from the tupelo tree in the front yard while the rest of the family was in the house setting up the table for a Mother’s Day celebration. No one saw or heard a thing. Read more
“The Goldfinch”
Maybe sometimes – the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be. Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?”…this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?” Read more
Paddock Post 