Here be minor SPOILERS.
The reason I like this book is because it's a great telling of trandimensionality and a great telling of romance. Crowley's got a knack for observing (to riff off the title) the way little things can have big effects, and the way big movements (establishment of political empire, the heaviness of multi-generational family relationships) play themselves out in small ways. It starts out as a kind of twee telling of an urban fable, but soon morphs (without changing language or style) into something completely other.
And that weird kind of flexibility -- the kind of story it is keeps changing, although different kinds of wooing, the winning and losing of hearts, are always central -- is reflected in the plot, which is essentially about a family (practially a Faulknerian backwoods dynasty) who, through accidents of history and location, have been involved with faeries. Although I don't think the word "faeries" occurs once in the rather fat text.
The ancestral home was built by a loony architect and has some Escher-like qualities, which might be a reflection of (or a reason for) the location's correspondence with beings from elsewhere. Their depiction is very otherworldly (and you can read them as metaphors or allegories for other things as well - nature, time, fate) and avoids the old motifs while still telling the same traditional stories -- there's a bit in the middle with a changeling that's truly horrifying and, I dunno, almost inexplicable. I mean, the novel brings new life to the idea that there's a fake child and it's a thing that SHOULD NOT BE HERE.
But I think even that counts as a minor spoiler. So much of the plot is interwoven in unexpected ways. Is a good read. |
