For a while, I had a job as a historical re-enactor. I actually learned a lot about Tudor England, specifically, but I also gained an accidental education in English history as a whole. I was surrounded, actually, by people with Masters degrees and PhDs in different English eras, and they loved telling me all about how the lower classes lived, because it’s so rarely discussed in mainstream media. If you’ve ever been around people who rant about their passions, you’ll know it can be very contagious. So I think on some level, I was always thinking about how I could work some of these interesting, lesser-known historical facts into a book.

Longshadow". Publishers Weekly. June 3, 2022. Archived from the original on March 5, 2023 . Retrieved March 5, 2023.The writing is completely not my style, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's just a conflict of tastes. I didn't like a lot of the humour in it, and particularly in the footnotes, which were annoying enough for me to listen to, without additional ones being added for unnecessary jokes. The change of tone to a snooty upper-class narration for the footnotes also did not work for me at all.

The writing is what I found most impressive. It is so hard to carry this kind of a tone without going too far and overworking and overburdening the prose. I think it’s so ambitious to try and be Good Omens adjacent, but create something unique to you and your voice, and not fall on your face. Gadriel is our main character. A fallen angel of petty temptations, they really mean no one any harm despite their job.. satisfied instead with nudging mortals here and there into tiny transgressions that tend to lead to happier lives than futures of damnation. Honestly, they're absolutely charming and they break my heart a little in this book.

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Holly’s gruff niece Ella was also a fabulous character, and her teenage life at school provided more exceptional opportunities for character development for all three: Gadriel, Holly, and Ella. Both Holly and Ella are dealing with emotional and psychological pain, and the bond between the three becomes one of catharsis and healing, in unintended ways for all of them. a b c Abbott, Alana Joli (November 24, 2022). "New Life for Old(er) Books: How Reprints at New Houses Find a Wider Audience". Paste. Archived from the original on November 27, 2022 . Retrieved March 2, 2023. Small Miracles charmed me with its simple, effortlessly funny story and likable characters. It's whimsical, often amusing, and there is hardly a dull moment.

While the Fantasy-Hive is not participating in this year’s Self-Publishing Fantasy Blog Off (SPFBO) – the eighth such event – we do have some overlap with people who are, which is how I got a recommendation to take a look at Small Miracles, a SPFBO8 finalist chosen by the Queen’s Book Asylum blog. Just as God created the platypus out of spare parts, Lucifer created the original chihuahua out of spare spite…one would be hard-pressed to find a more concentrated form of evil that the average chihuahua.” Overall, I would recommend this to anyone who likes smaller scale stories, warm cozy stories, and some wit with their prose. The second category of footnotes provide a running score update to quantify Gadriel’s successes and failures in de-miserifying Holly’s excessively virtuous existence. For example “+10 Points of Virtue (Holly Harker): Rescuing a Lost Kitten.” One can’t help feeling that Atwater must have had an excel spreadsheet open alongside the manuscript document as the precise accounting of these numbers is both the substance of Gadriel’s challenge and an important plot-point as the story approaches its denouement. Overall, I’m surprised and pleased that such an upbeat book won SPFBO. It’s nice to have a variety in your reading and this has set me up nicely for a return to the more apocalyptic themes I often read!Yet, true to her advanced sin metrics, Holly proves remarkably incorruptible, despite Gadriel’s initial efforts to inveigle Holly to live a little, and treat herself to some of the better things life has to offer. So Gadriel is forced to up his/her game, and use small miracles to achieve his/her ends. The book shares DNA with Good Omens and The Good Place, so it shares the flaws of those works as well. I’m not going to critique the point system and Christian-centric ideology, though I did like Gadriel’s exasperation/cynicism with the system. If you analyze the worldbuilding too much, it’s easy to find cringe aspects but I wasn’t too bothered by the Celestial Bureaucracy structure. I read this book as a Judge with Fantasy Faction blogging group. My personal opinion and rating. Other Judges have their own.

And while this is indeed a less heavy book than “Good Omens” (featuring such portentous figures as the Anitchrist and the four “bikers” of the Apocalypse) the ominous character Wormwood – an inexperienced devil whose mandate is to tempt humans to hell – from C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters”, appears in “SmallMiracles”, to provide an antagonist, if there is one, for the book.

Oh, goodness, you had to make me choose. Well, I think Gadriel is probably my favourite character. Gadriel is the Fallen Angel of Petty Temptations. She’s not really out to damn humanity—she just thinks people need to enjoy the little pleasures and stop being so hard on themselves. She’s also got lots of questions about the Rules, and the more straight-laced angels really don’t like that.