I'm borrowing language from a fellow reader's review to express my feelings about this book that I got nearly 400 pages into before I said, You know wI'm borrowing language from a fellow reader's review to express my feelings about this book that I got nearly 400 pages into before I said, You know what? Enough.
This book astounded me. Not in a good way. I expected to like "Little, Big" quite a bit from what I'd heard about it. But, like the Drinkwater house, it looks smaller on the outside than it feels from inside. Not in a good way. I mean the book feels like it's a thousand pages.
Some people like it, as you can tell by other reviews: the language is often quite clever, it ends on a semi-strong note, and it plays with myth in some interesting ways. These are all good things.
Bad things? Well, the characters aren't compelling, the clever language is often stilted and ponderously slow, and almost nothing happens. On top of that, the fantastical aspects of this book were never surprising or especially interesting.
When it comes to the characters, we run through four generations in about 600 pages. This gives us slightly more than a hundred pages per generation to get to know the characters, and Crowley clearly needs more pages than that to make them interesting. Only in the last of the four generations did I like any of them (Auberon and Sylvie). Before that, the motives of the characters were sketchy at best, and it didn't feel like any of the characters were DOING anything; they were waiting for something to happen. As a reader, I was doing the same thing.
Okay, here's the plot. A man marries into a family that lives in a gigantic, mysterious house in Edgewood. For generations, this family has been interacting in various strange ways with the Faerie folk that live in the forest around them. The family is part of a great Story, and they don't know quite what this story is going to be. Some members of the family come into direct contact with the fae, while others yearn to see them and are never able to. A few live lives of tragedy as a result of this proximity with the mythic side of reality, while others live semi-normal lives.
Being part of a grand Story? Having a Destiny? These are meaningless designations unless it ends up BEING a grand story. Or unless it feels like a destiny is reached. You can't entertain me by assuring me these people are Living Some Grand Story, when I can see clearly that Nothing is Happening. They're all hanging out at a house in the woods, going through the process of forgetting about their connection to the faerie realm because they believe this is the only safe thing for the family.
The fact that none of the reviews are hidden because of spoilers is a bit telling, no?...more
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