The dynamic between every character, big and small, flows so naturally. 3. And of course, it needs the other 750 pages in order to be able to produce that dozen. Reviews have said that it needed a good editor and I'd agree - way too waffly towards the end and I couldn't be arsed, which is a shame as I'd enjoyed the rest of it. Please, I just can't carry on with it anymore! The final pages of the book – the last thirteen pages – are great. Every other time disappointing books just ended disappointingly. Parents need to know that The Goldfinch is a drama-mystery based on Donna Tartt's 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Loved the teenaged Theo and everything up until he left Vegas- cried for him often! The scale of “The Goldfinch” opening weekend fiasco overshadowed the reality. I think my next book is going to be a Wodehouse to cheer me up a bit. I did not sign up to this **selfish rant alert**, Sign up to test The Nue Co.’s BARRIER CULTURE collection, Do you have questions about pregnancy or your new baby? Theo goes back to his hotel and Boris goes AWOL with Theo's passport.Theo realises that he can't get out of holland without a passport, it is Xmas eve and the embassy is shutting. and decides to hand himself in, confessing to murder as well as the art theft.Just then Boris reappears (on Xmas day) with a caseload of money. This is page 1 of 1 (This thread has 22 messages.). He contemplates suicide and starts writing notes to kitsey, Pippa, mrs Barbour and hobie.Then he changed his mind (cabt remember why?) Ans. I enjoyed the first half of the story with Theo in his teens a great deal, the latter part slightly less. It was just relentless misery.This does all seem rather negative, but I think I had really high expectations. ‘The Goldfinch’ | Anatomy of a Scene John Crowley narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Oakes Fegley and Jeffrey Wright. To use this feature subscribe to Mumsnet Premium - get first access to new features see fewer ads, and support Mumsnet. Have you read that? I loved Hobie, he is a wonderful character. Hth! Q. With Oakes Fegley, Ansel Elgort, Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright. Roadshow/Warner Bros Pictures. Ok, Boris takes him to Amsterdam where he has set up a sort of heist to get the painting. Those that finished the book --what did you think? Too wandering to be a review. When the goldfinch starts chirruping to the maximum, the scene becomes musical. Anybody want to take on The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt? "The Goldfinch" is the story of Theodore "Theo" Decker, whose entire life unravels when his mother is killed when a bomb explodes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A dozen? Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. ( Log Out /  Did not seem real or necessary. It’s brilliant. Scene by scene wise, I wish it would've been slightly less choppy. Readers shouldn't be ashamed of quitting a novel while the going's good. to think that DH should be contributing our rent? While the film is too messy to spark much award-season buzz and too plot-heavy to please the book’s readers, “The Goldfinch” still manages to be an earnest film. I, too, found the first third of the book riveting—particularly the whole scene showing the explosion at the museum in which the main character, a young boy, loses his mother and acquires the famous painting The Goldfinch. But it moves linearly, trudgingly so, and – again, as mentioned before – it must push our expectations ahead of it, page by page. I was very tempted to read this spoiler thread as I had got tired of the book.I think I struggled as it wasn't a particularly uplifting book, which is fine if you haven't got to plough through 700-odd pages. That’s odd, because I don’t as a rule care if characters are sympathetic or not. This reminded me of that. This was going to be a part of my December reading, but I’ve ended up writing so much about The Goldfinch, that I’ve decided to post it as a kind of review, or assessment. In the chaos and wreckage, a literally shell-shocked Theo is encouraged by the old man to steal the famous painting The Goldfinch—which Theo does, unsure of his own motivations. Theo uses the reward money to travel the world buying back the antique forgeries he sold. I’ve not read that Huxley – I think the only novel apart from BNW that I’ve read is Eyeless in Gaza. ( Log Out /  Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. For me, it made perfect sense and I enjoyed the back and forth between past and present. The book takes the time to show the closeness between Theo and his mom with various scenes of the two together, but the movie doesn’t even reveal Audrey Decker’s face until the very end. But doesn’t quite explain – or doesn’t adequately justify – the overall structure of the book, which opens, in media res, with a brief scene of Theo holed up in an Amsterdam hotel, with hints that he’s hiding out from the aftermath of some ugly crime, and then leaps all the way back to the start: his happy childhood and the act of violence that ripped it in two. Also loved Hobie, Pippa and Popchyk. It bursts into life when a goldfinch comes to feed her chicks. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is a complex story about Theodore “Theo” Decker, a young boy who suffers the loss of his mother in a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. So hated Theo's Dad and his partner. Hobie reveals that Welty loved the goldfinch as he knew a replica of it as a child. But still...I liked Boris, not as in "would like him to marry my daughter", more as a survivor.Quite fancied living at Hobie's, waxing the furniture and listening to the tick tock of the clocks. Would it be too silly a suggestion that you flip to the end and read it? It positively reeks of expertise, but learned, properly processed expertise, not anything ersatz, anything you could glean from Wikipedia. In fact, I think the common idea that a book is bad if it lacks sympathetic characters is idiotic. Did she mention those or is that my imagination? The life and energy that the bird brings to the tree is its most attractive feature of the poem. Then, in the last few pages, there’s a moment of blinding humanity which reaches back and recasts the entire book. Notes on creative writing: How long should a chapter be? A bigger change comes after Theo waits for Boris for weeks in an Amsterdam hotel after their botched attempt to take the painting back from local criminals. Where The Little Friend and The Secret History (from memory) stuck very much to their designated locales (Mississippi and Vermont, respectively), The Goldfinch moves about, giving us New York, Las Vegas and parts of Europe. His marriage to kitsey is sort of on hold but recognised by both of them as convenient....Think that's it in terms of plot- there's a lot of philosophical musing on art, live etc at the end! I know everyone is saying its too long but I think it was almost Dickensian in the way it had a big cast of characters and such huge scope, in terms of time, geography etc, and maybe were just not used to 'big' books like that any more. Chapter 1. Can anyone tell me how The Goldfinch ends? I am interested to know what happens but it feels like I will neve reach the end! I adored this book and shed many a tear for Theo. 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