Small Miracles

Product Information

a b "Acquisition Announcement: Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater". Orbit Books. April 5, 2022. Archived from the original on May 24, 2022 . Retrieved March 2, 2023. I feel conflicted about the rating because SMALL MIRACLES is incredibly readable, funny, and heartwarming — I tore through it within two hours. It’s not a romance, so don’t go in with those expectations (there’s a temporary-ish HFN which makes sense with the story, but it’s NOT a capital R Genre Romance). The heart of the story concerns a hapless aunt struggling to connect with her wayward orphaned niece, and the guardian fallen angel who falls in love with the family. Kudos to how Atwater approaches gender fluidity in the novel! As per many interpretations of Angels from a Christian perspective, which denotes them as not being assigned a gender in the way humans can comprehend. Atwater notes in her work, casually,

If Good Omens was a rom-com and put less emphasis on David Tennant and… I mean Aziraphale and Crowley, it would be close to Small Miracles. Or the other way round. I guess one is better than the other? Perhaps? Gaiman and Pratchett vs Olivia Atwater? This was not supposed to be a difficult choice. There are many favourite parts of the book I could list, but one of them is the casual treatment of gender fluidity and queerness. As Steve Jobs would have said, It Just Works; effortless, unforced, and wonderful. I read (or listened to, actually) this as one of the SPFBO8 finalists, and while giving all titles a fair shot, I'm not going to pretend that this one won me over. I thought it was absolutely terrible, but that big caveat is there to say that this is absolutely not to sort of book I would ever read under my own steam (hence no rating), so there's every chance that if you like this sort of thing, it will at least work for you. I’m an American and even I noticed some inaccurate British terminology. I just don’t get why this had to be set in London — the story could’ve easily worked in NYC or Toronto. Again: this doesn’t personally bother me but I know it’s a dealbreaker for some folks. It wasn’t egregious but definitely present. Gadriel is a fallen angle who specializes in petty temptations. They’re not trying to bring down humanity, they just want to make sure we’re enjoying it sufficiently. They’re still a “fallen” angel, though, so they were surprised when their sibling, Barachiel, shows up and WANTS them to try and tempt a human into sinning. Just a little bit of sinning. This human, Holly, has lived such a joyless life that even the “good” angels are like, okay, wtf, that woman needs some happiness, STAT. Atwater has a degree in technical writing and editing. [3] She lives in Montreal, Quebec with her husband Nicholas and her two cats. [3] Bibliography [ edit ] Regency Faerie Tales [ edit ]

FBC Info

An uncomplicated plot but with complicated, conflicted ch One point of annoyance was the overuse of one phrase - I'll put it in spoilers here so as not to sensitize you to it before you read the book, but come here after and tell me you didn't notice lots of mentions of Holly's cheeks, specifically "the apples of her cheeks" .

Small Miracles is Team Queen's Book Asylum's SPFBO 8 finalist. Our group review can be read on Queen's Book Asylum, and our overall rating was 8.3/10. 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.The angelic beings’ gender fluidity is an interesting touch with a consistent explanation within the story. The human characters accept this pretty much at face value with Holly simply noting “I don’t mean to be insulting… it’s just that… weren’t you a woman before.” Holly’s open-mindedness is refreshing, particularly in the contemporary context. I won’t dwell on the story details. It deliberately seeks out the small pleasures of contemporary life that occur everyday and help you wade through the daily grind. Chocolate being one major example. I had already read and very much enjoyed an earlier self published trilogy by the author (E.g. Half a Soul) which gently satirised Jane Austen/Brontë sister storylines by inserting a slightly harder edge to life in those periods, and with more contrarian characters. Maybe that harder undertone to the plot which I’d liked wasn’t quite as clear here as in that previous trilogy. My only other concern was the use of footnotes, which I’m not a fan of, especially when reading in my preferred ebook format. Fortunately their use wasn’t excessive and I saw why they were used in some instances.

When I first came up with the idea of Half a Soul , all I knew was that my main character had lost half of her soul, and that this caused her to be far less socially adept. I asked myself how best to set up a conflict around this, and obviously the Regency era seemed like the worst possible time period to be a woman who can’t read social cues. The Regency genre is also similar to classical faerie tales in many respects, with several Cinderella elements to it, so it made for a nice parallel. As soon as I’d decided on the Regency era, I bothered all of my old historical friends and found myself someone with a Regency thesis to consult—and then, the first book basically wrote itself!But Gadriel has an out. In what appears to be a simple task for the formidable powers of an angel, if Gadriel can successfully tempt a mortal without sin, named Holly Harker, to stray, his/her debt will be erased.