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A review by mgdoherty
Small Angels by Lauren Owen
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
This book carved me open and scooped out the contents of my heart and then rebuilt me. At its heart, it’s about generational trauma, about generations of abused children and drunk parents and unloved daughters and murdered siblings and loved ones gone too soon, all while Mockbeggar Woods preside over the village, as old and powerful as gods. I love the writing style and how each characters’ voice is so distinct. The format was beautiful and really suited to the magical fairytale feeling; multiple characters told their stories or part of their stories as we moved through the main plot, and each chapter both added to the main story and also felt like a complete fairytale in and of itself.
This is such a tender story. There is so much tenderness and forgiveness here. Forgiving yourself for being a child who didn’t know any better, forgiving yourself your selfishness, and offering grace to everyone including yourself. And refusing to live in the story someone else wrote for you, because that someone else maybe didn’t write your story from a place of love, but a place of resentment.
Definitely a new favorite book here.
This is such a tender story. There is so much tenderness and forgiveness here. Forgiving yourself for being a child who didn’t know any better, forgiving yourself your selfishness, and offering grace to everyone including yourself. And refusing to live in the story someone else wrote for you, because that someone else maybe didn’t write your story from a place of love, but a place of resentment.
Definitely a new favorite book here.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Murder
Minor: Child abuse
Content warning if you can’t handle reading about buried alive (but also it is not REALLY about being buried alive). Spoilery details here: so the ghost remembers inhabiting his body *after* he was dead and buried, so while he wasn’t really buried alive, his memories sort of feel like he was still alive beneath the ground. And other characters will sometimes “feel” his memories of being underground, sometimes very very viscerally to point of coughing up soil. (Coughing up soil only happens once though.)