A review by readingtheend
The Dollmaker by Nina Allan

3.5

(a floor book!) in a twist nobody saw coming, I actually quite enjoyed this! I was sure I wouldn't, and that it would be too frightfully literary for me, but it's got an epistolary element, and there are short stories from a fictional short story collection interspersed throughout, and those two things were pleasing to me. it's a story about blurring the lines of fact and fiction, which is always quite cool, and I liked that the central two characters aren't immediately, magically in love at the end. the book is interested in dwarfism, and a lot of the characters in the short stories are little people, and I never did feel quite sanguine that the author cared about little people qua people, rather than as sort of ... intriguing literary devices. so that was a simmering discomfort the whole time I was reading, and it's ultimately why I won't reread.