 Hello, and welcome to Bite Size Book Review. My name is Kate, and today I will be reviewing The Secret History by Donna Tart. This is a work of literary fiction but also has some dark academia elements. The plot of this book is the main character Richard reminiscing on his time at a small liberal arts college in Vermont, where he studied classics with a very eccentric instructor along with some very odd co-eds and their adventures as they decide to get together and kill one of their classmates. That's how the book opens, that's an initial thing right off the bat so no spoilers. This sort of goes into the build up to killing one of their classmates and then the consequences of killing said classmate. What I liked about this story was the tension. Tart makes it very clear that you don't know things. You are very specifically in Richard's perspective for the entirety of the book, which means that you are able to tell when Richard doesn't know something, there's this tension between his knowledge and the knowledge that something is going on. You know that you don't know, but you don't know what you don't know. It makes every single scene in this book feel sinister. I also really loved the writing. It's very dreamlike, which is very effective as the framing device of the novel is that this is a person looking back on their memories of certain events. I also really enjoyed the characters. They were all kind of awful people but they were all very interesting and I was interested in learning about them as people and how their awfulness all came together to kill one of their classmates. But I really loved the inclusion of the classics, the focus on ancient Greece and Greek as a language. I loved me some ancient Greece. What I didn't like about this book was that I thought the ending lacked the punch necessary after all of the tension. I felt like it just didn't hit as hard as I hoped it would. At some point in the second half as well, the tension sort of dipped and never quite got back to the height that it managed to be in the first half of the book, which wasn't a catastrophic issue and didn't ruin the book for me, but I did note that it was just sort of a little bit less tense in the second half. Overall I gave this 4 out of 5 stars and I loved it. It was super fun and I would wholeheartedly recommend it if you're looking to get into Donna Tartt but don't quite feel up to reading the Goldfinch yet because...same. It is a thrilling ride and a really good campus story. And that's all for this Bite Size Book Review. I'll see you next time.