The Secret History

It's taking me quite a long time to gather my thoughts and properly put them down into coherent sentences. However, I have tried, I really did. But let me do something unorthodox here. I'll start with the ending and work back up. That ending. It frustrated me. I screamed and yelled like a little baby, throwing tantrums left and right. It couldn't just end like that. It couldn't. But I realized that Donna Tartt knew exactly how it would end when she wrote this. It was methodological. It was planned. It didn't fight against the current; it gleefully jumped in and swam with it.
All the characters that we've been introduced to have been horrible in some way. But let me tell you something that I realized. The characters in the special Greek Classics group were taught by Julian, their professor, that they were better than the rest. In fact, he made it a point that they would never mingle in the same classes as the gentry. He built them up, higher than they ever thought they could be, and convinced them of it. But those foundations that he built with his words and his belief in them came crashing down. The more superior, the highly intelligent students were the one that crashed to the abyss. The other characters that were horrible in some way, dealing with drugs or drank until they couldn't stand anymore, had decent okay lives. This irony, this juxtaposition of people versus the higher-class really made this book stand out. I can justifiably compare this to the Great Gatsby. This is perhaps even better than the Great Gatsby. Her characters and her writing is definitely on par with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Oh lord.
There are no antagonists in this book, at least any tangible ones. Granted, you could say that one of the group WAS an antagonist but he was just the unfortunate soul. But really, if I had to be specific, fate is an antagonist. They, themselves, were the antagonists. They fought so hard against what they believed they didn't deserve that they got worse punishments. I won't elaborate, but I'm going to leave only one thing here at the end of the review.
“Was it truly worth it?”