Product Description
In a small Mississippi town, Harriet Cleve Dusfrenes grows up haunted by the murder of her brother, who was found hanging from a tree in their yard when she was just a baby. Robin's killer was never identified, and the family has never recovered from the tragedy. Harriet's father mostly absent, her mother incapacitated by grief, and her teenage sister unable to recall what she saw that terrible day. Harriet lives largely in the world of her imagination, alone even in company, obsessed by Robin who is a link to the happier past she knows from stories and photographs. And then one summer, the year she turns twelve, Harriet decides to find his murderer and exact his revenge. Even more transfixing than its predecessor, "The Little Friend" is a dark novel of lost childhood, breathtaking in its ambition and power, rich in moral paradox and profound insights into human frailty. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Gothic horrors in Magnolia-land.
Weird happenings within an even weirder family combine with the "fusty, drunken perfume of Magnolia" to fill this southern Gothic novel with bizarre behavior and pervasive threats of death and revenge. Forces of evil are at work, according to Charlotte Cleve, a mother of three, who believes the mysterious hanging death of her nine-year-old son Robin resulted because she changed her traditional Mother's Day celebration from noon to six o'clock on the day he died.

Twelve years after Robin's death, his fiercely independent sister Harriet, now twelve herself, investigates the circumstances of Robin's death, bent on identifying and punishing his murderer. Bearing little resemblance to Scout, the endearing heroine of To Kill a Mockingbird, single-minded Harriet recognizes no limits and is willing to do anything, including using a gun, to accomplish her goals. Confronting ex-cons who run a crystal meth lab, ditsy great-aunts who know what's "right," redneck children who lurk in the bushes, two snake-handling preachers, a mother who turns her house into a maze filled with piles of rotting, old newspapers, and a sister who sleeps seventeen hours a day ("I only get bored when I'm awake," she says), Harriet takes more comfort from her plans for revenge than from traditional southern values.

Tartt's themes of death and punishment achieve some sense of universality through her use of numerous symbols and parallels, often with animals, but these are frequently sentimental. The euthanasia of a beloved pet cat; Harriet's accidental killing of a blackbird stuck in tar, snakes handled by hillbilly preachers; and the vicious dogs of the Ratliff family haunt the narrative. The old family home is called Tribulation; Harriet's heroes are Sherlock Holmes, Harry Houdini, and Captain Scott, the explorer; and she spends much of the novel looking for a pair of red gloves given to her by her black housekeeper, whom she loves but treats with casual cruelty.

The plot strains credulity, even for southern Gothic, and Harriet, as a twelve-year-old protagonist, is too wild and out-of-control to inspire much empathy as a character. The narrative focus of the novel gets lost, and many episodes, only peripherally related to the original search for justice, seem to become narrative ends in themselves. Filled with dense imagery and melodrama, this novel will appeal to those looking for fast escape reading. Mary Whipple
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Product Description
Described as "the closest thing to a rock star" in graphic design today (USA Today), Chip Kidd is universally recognized as an American master of contemporary book design. At the forefront of a revolution in publishing, Kidd's iconic covers, with their inventive marriage of type and found images, have influenced an entire generation of design practitioners in many fields.Chip Kidd: Book One collects all of his book covers and designs for the first time, as well as hundreds of developmental sketches and concepts-annotated by Kidd and by many of the best-selling authors he's worked with over the years. The result is an important contribution to the design canon today as well as a visually dazzling (and often hilarious) insider's look at the design and publishing process.The book also showcases Kidd's work with comics and graphic novels, including his collaborations with leading artists and writers in the field. Featured are projects for DC Comics, including Batman and Superman, as well as Kidd's award-winning exploration of the art of Charles M. Schulz. Chip Kidd: Book One is sure to enthrall design aficionados, book lovers, pop-culture fanatics, comics fans, and design students. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Chip Kidd
Book received in pretty good condition. A few deep wrinkles on the cover and back pages. Otherwise, was sufficiently presentable.

Wow This Was Fun
After I picked up Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky, I happened to look at the cover-design credit and recognized the name Chip Kidd. After a moment's reflection as to the source of my familiarity with the designer, I walked over to my bookshelf and picked up a volume from my collection of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha. Sure enough, Kidd had designed the covers for the entire series (incidentally, I found the design one part frustrating and one part inspiring, as the spines line up nicely and thematically but the half-jacket is kind of obnoxious to deal with).

After that, I went through my shelves and picked out any of the books that I thought had interesting covers. At least half of those were designed by Kidd as well. Kafka on the Shore. Pagan Babies. The Enigma of Japanese Power. Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans. Et cetera.

I was intrigued, Googled our dear designer, and found that he was more popular than I had properly imagined. This piqued still further my curiosity. And so now I have another book with a cover designed by Kidd: Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006, a 400-page volume exhibiting a sample of his book-jacket designwork from the last twenty years.

The book itself is a treasure. A visual smorgasbord of styles and themes. A veritable cornucopia of novel treatments. While there is an occasional overlap of feel or technique (or some other abstract quantification equally obscured and subjective), the breadth of design direction is truly impressive.

Kidd is clearly a creative devil.

And this collection of his work is impressively presented. Book One is a treat for both the eyes and the mind. While a mere presentation of the jacket designs themselves would be a worthwhile scheme for a design collection such as this, the work is elevated by helpful descriptions both of product and process by the creator himself as well as reactions penned by authors/victims of his creative process. Kidd's text shows both a joy in his work and a look into what goes into the crafting of a book jacket that enlarges upon the work it containsand does so with humour and more apparent humility than I would have expected.

I found the book so interesting that I blew through the entire thing in two days. Doubtlessly, I'll return to it time and again over the coming months and years. In any case, I highly recommend it to those interested in thoughtful design, a pairing of words too rare in our day.

NOTE: a big bone of contention is not the visual design of the volume's cover but its physical properties. While its dimensions are perfectly suitable for an art collection/coffee table read, the unique composition of its cover can be difficult to negotiate. The hardback cover only extends (front and back) to the point of the spine of the book photographed on the cover. Inside the hardback cover is a paperback cover that extends to house the rest of the book. It is awkward, certainly, and took a bit of getting used to, but once I became accustomed to the book, holding it comfortably ceased to be a difficulty. Heh, a book with a physical learning curvethat was a new one for me.

Great Book
This is a great, great book. If you're a fan of Kidd's work, by all means buy this book. If you are at all interested in truly inspirational graphic design, this book is a must-have.

PROS: having so many of Kidd's designs in one place is worth the price of admission, inclusion of the development and back story of each cover is interesting and elucidating, stories of his adventures in the trade are well-written and fun to learn about.

CONS: the cover is awkward, the shape of the book makes it hard to hold while reading- you really have to put it on something flat - it's sometimes difficult to decipher exactly which pictures the captions are referencing.

There is a definite form-over-function issue with the book, but the content is what counts - and that gets 5 stars from me without a quibble.

Chip Kidd's Jacketdesigns
I HAD to buy this book after having read about it in another forum. Kidd's artworks are superb!

Why are you reading this itstead of buying the book?
This book is bound with a split hardback/softback cover, so if you appreciate design -- which I assume you do since you're considering a compilation of book designs -- the book is worth buying for this odd cover arrangement alone. ... Read more