The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

I loved this book (if you are a Kindle reader, you could consider that version to reduce wrist strain when reading it, because it is in the nearly 800-page range and not a light read on any level).  It was one of the New York Times Best Books in 2013, and while I haven't waded too deeply into their notable books for the year, I have read more than 1/3 the Booker Prize long list and this is better than they (except for the winner).

The story follows Theo Decker frome early adolescence into his late 20's.  The very best thing about this book is that Theo is complicate don many levels, despite his early age when we meet him.  He is in trouble at school, for what he is not exactly sure, but as he rolls the list of possibilities in his mind, it is pretty clear that he is a guy who likes to try things, and if it is forbidden then it might hold additional allure for him.  Unfortunately, en route to his appointment with the principal, he and his mother are waylaid by a bomb going off in an art museum.

Theo lives, but his mother does not.  While he is regaining consciousness, Theo is urged by a fellow victim to pocket a very lovely painting on his way out of the gallery that day--“The Goldfinch” (pictured here), a 1654 painting by Carel Fabritius, which he does.  Theo spends some time with the family of a friend of his, which lays the groundwork for what happens later in the novel, and then is collected by his father.  The trauma of losing his mother is hard to equal, but Theo's father is a close second.  He is a drunk, a drug addict, and a gambler who ends up in an early grave with the Russina mob hot on his trail--so not a stabilizing influence.  Theo spends this part of his life experimenting heavily with drugs and alcohol with very little in the way of supervision or boundaries, and it sets up a life long pattern of addiction that on the one hand he acknowledges, but on the other does very little to combat it.

Which is not to imply that Theo is unlikable--the reader is very much pulling for him, and since his father sold off all of his mother's possessions, in some ways this stolen painting is what he has left to remind him of her, a talisman of sorts, but one that has some significant drawbacks as well.  The book builds to an exciting conclusion with lost of ends left open to keep you thinking, but not so many as to be annoying.  Wonderful book.