Richard comes from a broken home, with a toxic family dynamic and a lack of a close familial bond with his parents. He has always felt isolated from everyone, likely because he never received affection from the people who raised him, which ended up building an invisible wall between him and the rest of society. Intellectual and opinionated in nature, he looks down on the day-to-day mediocrities of present-day mainstream society, and longs for something more profound and romanticized, a poetic life that is above the ordinary.Fortunately for Richard, that is the exact thing he finds once he gets accepted into an elite college in Vermont, and gets entangled with a group of students who live in their own little world, isolated from everyone else, just like him. These students are the elite "chosen-ones" who have been handpicked by a senior Greek language instructor, who has bent the rules of the academic institution he's in and made himself their sole teacher, keenly following ancient Greek traditions, where student and master have a long-term relationship with each other, and the student learns everything they need to from that one instructor, adding a more intimate, romanticized aspect to the student/teacher relationship, much like Plato and Aristotle. It seems like Richard got everything he wished for when he was accepted among these elites, but little does he know that beneath their pristine and well-polished exterior, a darker and more gruesome reality is festering.

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”

This book was my first venture into dark academia, a genre I always heard about but had trouble understanding, and I think this book served as a good introduction to the genre, having the most typical aspects of what one might expect. An academic college setting, highlighting the day to day life of students, but through a somewhat aristocratic, high-strung lens, with an over-the-top elitist attitude being the main highlight of most of the characters. I admit that it took me a while to warm up to this atmosphere, because most of the characters were very unlikable for a small while until I was able to bond with them. There's a snobbery and intellectual elitism that is definitely present within the social dynamics of these characters, where your value as a human is determined by things like your favourite poem from the ancient Greek era. The characters have highly specific and refined tastes that are nothing short of frustratingly uptight. One would wonder what I actually enjoyed about this book, but this is where Donna Tartt worked her magic through her authorial voice. The more I read about these characters, the more I warmed up to their ridiculously snobby eccentricity.It was a pleasantly surprising case of being handed a handful of annoying and pretentious characters and ending up eventually liking them and even feeling sorry for them, seeing them for what they truly are, "unique" souls who feel fundamentally misunderstood by society, and building their own romanticized bubble, away from regular society.For them, this bubble was their fixation on ancient Greek culture, a lens they used to navigate the late 20th century American world. Both the pleasantries and dangers of this approach to life were highlighted really nicely in this work. On the one hand, it gives reality a richly romanticized overlay, which makes life more interesting and meaningful, and on the other hand, it leads to a dangerous and even deadly disconnect from the real-world, justifying atrocities.


 “There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”

I would consider this book to be an in-depth character exploration, delving into the psyche of this group of students. Do not read this expecting a richly plot-centered narrative, and don't read it expecting a typical mystery novel either.Yes, there is a murder, but we know who the murdered person is very early on, and we even know who did it, so the mystery isn't really what drives this book, but it's the characters themselves, their motivations and their way of viewing the world. The writing style and the intellectual explorations Donna Tartt engages in throughout this work are the engines which drive this story. The atmosphere is almost always dark and gloomy, and the atmospheric work here is definitely top-notch. I would recommend reading this book during a darkly grey, rainy week. Despite being in America, there is a very gothic "British" feel to this book, and it reminds me of grey London winters. This wintry atmosphere combined with the themes of isolation, intellectual elitism and the fixation on crystallized ideals makes this a very interesting book.


What I find brilliant in this work is the fact that the author seemed to have taken a ridiculous set of characters, made them do ridiculously nonsensical things that defy limits of rational thinking, but somehow made it a very romanticized and intellectually deep story to read, just by the sheer force of her writing.This book has been classified as literary fiction, so this does make sense, and is a testament of a work that successfully did what it set out to do, in my opinion. However, if you're into plot, and characters that are actually accessible and relatable, who do things that make sense, then this isn't really the book for you. These students almost don't seem to be human, and they quite literally feel like a group of time travelers who happened to stumble upon an era that is completely incompatible with them. However, if you're into literary fiction and don't mind and even enjoy a lot of character exploration and a good amount of philosophizing and atmosphere building that doesn't necessarily have a clear direction, this book is definitely a must read. I would definitely consider this a classic that will stand the test of time, it just needs the right audience for it.


 “Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”