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A review by akallabeth
Small Miracles by Olivia Atwater
lighthearted
fast-paced
for me, this is a 2.5. opting to leave it unrated - at least for now - as i'm truly not the audience for this, which i knew going in.
i picked this up as a mild concession to the valentine's season + because i think it's important to check in on genres you don't normally like every once in a while. reading tastes change!
cozy fantasy, alas, continues not to be for me. i had basically the same main issue with this book that often plagues the sub-genre for me, which is that the wolrdbuilding, if you think about it long enough, has some really uncomfortable implications. which i don't mind on its own! but because this is a cozy fantasy, the book never engages with them. so i'm just left feeling vaguely queasy. which is not cozy at all.
in terms of simpler complaints - this book was set in the uk & i don't see why it needed to be. the school uniforms? the characters rarely sound particularly british. could've been in toronto. except that would feel less good omensy i suppose, on which note -
- there were too many footnotes. i get and respect the pratchett homage but the density of footnotes per page was a bit disruptive reading digitally (i'm sure it's less so in paperback) and i didn't feel all the footnotes were funny enough to justify it.
overall though i wouldn't discourage cozy fantasy fans (who do not share my hangups about the genre) from reading this - it's sweet and very readable; i certainly could've picked a worse book to run my little experiment on. no hard feelings ms atwater!
(read for r/fantasy book bingo, square: angels & demons (hm). also works for: indie or self-pub.)
i picked this up as a mild concession to the valentine's season + because i think it's important to check in on genres you don't normally like every once in a while. reading tastes change!
cozy fantasy, alas, continues not to be for me. i had basically the same main issue with this book that often plagues the sub-genre for me, which is that the wolrdbuilding, if you think about it long enough, has some really uncomfortable implications. which i don't mind on its own! but because this is a cozy fantasy, the book never engages with them. so i'm just left feeling vaguely queasy. which is not cozy at all.
in terms of simpler complaints - this book was set in the uk & i don't see why it needed to be. the school uniforms? the characters rarely sound particularly british. could've been in toronto. except that would feel less good omensy i suppose, on which note -
- there were too many footnotes. i get and respect the pratchett homage but the density of footnotes per page was a bit disruptive reading digitally (i'm sure it's less so in paperback) and i didn't feel all the footnotes were funny enough to justify it.
overall though i wouldn't discourage cozy fantasy fans (who do not share my hangups about the genre) from reading this - it's sweet and very readable; i certainly could've picked a worse book to run my little experiment on. no hard feelings ms atwater!
(read for r/fantasy book bingo, square: angels & demons (hm). also works for: indie or self-pub.)