Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who do not know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: the small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As a thirteen-year-old boy, Theo's life is turned upside down when he and his mother visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see an exhibition of Dutch masterpieces, including a favorite painting of hers, Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch.

He takes the painting with him, and in Las Vegas, makes a new friend, Boris Pavlikovsky, the cosmopolitan son of a Ukrainian émigré.

Boris disappears, leaving Theo in his hotel room, where he drinks, takes drugs, and recovers from illness, and is afraid that police will discover him.

After several days, Boris returns and reveals that he has resolved the situation by phoning the art recovery police to inform on the dealers.

After arriving in the United States, Theo travels the country, using the reward money to buy back the fake antiques from customers.

He realizes that Pippa does love him, but she would not openly reciprocate his feelings because she believes they share the same injury and flaws, both having survived the trauma of the museum explosion and both self-medicating to ease their psychological scars.

In a lengthy reflection, Theo wonders how much of his experiences were unavoidable due to fate or his character, and contemplates The Goldfinch and "the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire".

The novel ends on a curious note, inasmuch as Theo's contemplation demonstrates both a hard fate still ahead and a sort of redeeming immortality through the admiration of beauty.

[11] Booklist wrote, "Drenched in sensory detail, infused with Theo's churning thoughts and feelings, sparked by nimble dialogue, and propelled by escalating cosmic angst and thriller action, Tartt's trenchant, defiant, engrossing, and rocketing novel conducts a grand inquiry into the mystery and sorrow of survival, beauty and obsession, and the promise of art.

"[14] Woody Brown, writing in Art Voice, described The Goldfinch as a "marvelous, epic tale, one whose 773 beautiful pages say, in short: 'How can we?

'"[15] In mid-2014, Vanity Fair reported that the book had "some of the severest pans in memory from the country's most important critics and sparked a full-on debate in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself."

"[3] The novel was 15th in the decade-end list of Paste, with Josh Jackson writing, "'Literary fiction' can sometimes be code for 'lightly plotted,' but every so often a book comes around that is as engagingly told as it is beautifully written.

[18] Kakutani listed the book as one of the greatest of the 21st century as part of a poll by Vulture, arguing, "In the hands of a lesser novelist, [its] developments might feel contrived, but Tartt writes with such authority and verve and understanding of character that her story becomes just as persuasive as it is suspenseful.

"[23] Tartt herself was praised as "a novelist at the top of her art" by Le Journal du Dimanche[24] and as a "writing magician who is generous with detours, reflections and characters" by the news website NU.nl.

[25] The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant printed a five-star review and called it "a Bildungsroman written in a beautiful and often scintillating style.

[26] De Limburger[27] Cutting Edge[28] also gave it a five-star review and suggested that Tartt had "written the best novel of 2013.

"[30] Another Dutch newspaper, Het Parool, sums it up as a "beautiful, exciting novel, filled with fascinating characters.

NRC Handelsblad rated the book two out of five stars,[32] writing that it was "like reading a twenty-first-century variant on Dickens", with the characters being "cliché" and not fleshed out.