By this point it is Charlotte’s mother, the stern Edie, who has taken the responsibility amongst the multitude of aunts to help bring up Charlotte’s two daughters, Allison, 16, and Harriet, 12. This irreplaceable idyll is destroyed when Robin is found hanging from a noose at the bottom of the family garden.Ī killer is never found, and the enigmatic circumstances surrounding Robin’s death eat away at the Cleve family until the family unit becomes but a pale imitation of its former glory, which is how they appear twelve years later in the novel’s opening chapter. Donna Tartt’s ‘The Little Friend’ begins with a prologue describing the Edenic existence of the Cleve family: the prattle of the assembly of aunt the happiness of Charlotte, Dix and their three children the youthful zest of their eldest, the red-haired, freckled, nine year-old Robin who steals the hearts of all his family members with his boundless energy.
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