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The Goldfinch
Oct. 30th, 2025 08:01 pmI tasked my husband Dave with picking random numbers that would correspond to unread books on my shelf to build my November TBR - and one of the books he picked was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. And I'm so glad he did, because otherwise it would have languished there perhaps for a very long time and I had no desire to pick it up. I actually started it ten days early to give myself a jump on what is a ridiculous TBR for November - and I finished it before the end of October!
It's been a few hours since I finished and I think I'm still processing...
At root, it's a pretty dreary story about largely terrible people taking way too many drugs and doing pretty awful things - but there's something about it (the writing? the stark, realistic, painful yet horribly relatable and heartrending emotional honesty?) that meant I found it hard to put down.
By the halfway point, it was a strong contender for my best book of the year and an easy five-star rating. But the time jump at the start of the second half, and a lot of the second half itself, sent it a bit off the rails for me.
But then the last ten pages... The last ten pages! They lay out in blunt and overly didactic tones exactly what the book is meant to be about and what message you're meant to take away from it - and I figure, if you feel like you have to do that at the end of your book, you maybe haven't written a very good book...? But they are also ten of the best pages I've read in any book ever, and left me reeling.
This is not a perfect book by any means. And I can absolutely see why a lot of people might really hate it. And I'm really not sure I can think of anyone I would unreservedly recommend it to.
But I found it compelling, impactful, immersive, raw, emotive, involving - and likely unforgettable.
I hardly ever give five-star ratings for anything, but this book is making me reconsider my approach to that. Perfect? Far from it. But five stars? No question.
It's been a few hours since I finished and I think I'm still processing...
At root, it's a pretty dreary story about largely terrible people taking way too many drugs and doing pretty awful things - but there's something about it (the writing? the stark, realistic, painful yet horribly relatable and heartrending emotional honesty?) that meant I found it hard to put down.
By the halfway point, it was a strong contender for my best book of the year and an easy five-star rating. But the time jump at the start of the second half, and a lot of the second half itself, sent it a bit off the rails for me.
But then the last ten pages... The last ten pages! They lay out in blunt and overly didactic tones exactly what the book is meant to be about and what message you're meant to take away from it - and I figure, if you feel like you have to do that at the end of your book, you maybe haven't written a very good book...? But they are also ten of the best pages I've read in any book ever, and left me reeling.
This is not a perfect book by any means. And I can absolutely see why a lot of people might really hate it. And I'm really not sure I can think of anyone I would unreservedly recommend it to.
But I found it compelling, impactful, immersive, raw, emotive, involving - and likely unforgettable.
I hardly ever give five-star ratings for anything, but this book is making me reconsider my approach to that. Perfect? Far from it. But five stars? No question.
