When thirteen-year-old Theo Decker miraculously survives a domestic terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum—an attack that kills his mother and several others—he’s pitched into a Dickensian tale, with a cast including the blue-blood Barbours and an absent father with a bleached-blond, strung-out Las Vegas waitress for a girlfriend. Theo is taken in by the eccentric Hobie, an antique-furniture restorer, after the man learns his beloved business partner spent his final minutes in Theo’s company. Wherever he is, Theo guiltily clings to a tiny Dutch masterpiece called The Goldfinch (Little, Brown, $30), a painting his mother loved, and as he grows into an alienated and lonely adult, his heartsick love for another bombing survivor, red-headed Pippa, becomes an obsession that attests to Theo’s arrested adolescence. Meanwhile, the painting leads Theo through a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game in the art world’s dark underbelly. Donna Tartt’s magnificent third novel is a masterful coming-of-age tale brimming with humor, pathos, philosophical turns, and a faint, yet undeniable, brushstroke of hope.
