When The Little Friend was published in 2002, readers had been waiting ten years for Tartt's second novel after her smash debut The Secret History (1992). Critics generally responded positively to The Little Friend. Jason Crowley of the New Statesman called the novel "audacious, implausible and enchanting," and noted that by novel's end, "there remains something indefinable and ultimately mysterious about this novel, a certain elegiac tone and lingering regret for the passing, if not of youth, then of an innocence that perhaps never existed at all."

Many commentators saw it as a Southern novel. In World Literature Today, Marvin J. LaHood said,

It is Tartt's understanding of southern ethos that gives The Little Friend substance. Those things that every great southern novelist seems to understand—family, tradition, class, race, the tradition of storytelling—Tartt enhances with her own memorable and brooding style.

Much critical praise focused on...