The Goldfinch

Redemption. I often lose patience while reading a fat novel. I find myself selecting how many hundred pages could be jettisoned without losing much value. While Donna Tartt’s novel, The Goldfinch, comes in at just under 800 pages, I never once found myself impatient or wondering which pages could be deleted easily. Tartt’s plot kept me engaged from the opening crisis through the redemptive denouement. The protagonist narrator, Theo Decker, calmly relates his coming of age story from age 13 when an accident kills his mother, until about a dozen years later when his moral compass finds a true course and leads him to face the consequences of his past mistakes. The many other characters are all complex and interesting: fully fleshed out humans whose actions, like ours, are a mix of doing good and choosing a lesser path when expedient. Tartt uses a painting to hold the novel together, and that layer alone made the construction of this novel both interesting and enjoyable. I loved the plot and the characters, as Tartt’s language brought me hours of reading pleasure. Rating: Five-star (I love it) Click here to purchase The Goldfinch from amazon.com.