Rated 3.0 / 5 from 1 log on Katalog
All cosy fantasy faces a conundrum: you have to be a very good writer indeed, to live in the fantasy genre, rob yourself from the crutch of grand, sweeping stakes, and write a good book. This writer, as sweet as they must be to write a story this harmless, is not good enough yet. I suppose it’s possible they could become such, but I honestly doubt it. Not because they are dull or uninteresting, but because they’ve chosen an exceptionally challenging medium. You have to be really, really good, to write small stories. Narrative minimalism, as it were, means you have very little to hide behind. You dont have the shield of meticulous, creative worldbuilding concepts or the fog of thematically interlocking quests and stakes. You don’t have the luxury of drawing on grand conflicts and military strategy you’ve studied, or scientific concepts you are interested in and want to explore. No you just have ordinary characters with limited powers living their lives. You can’t even shock your audience with cheap grimdark tropes of extreme cruelty, violence and vice. So you have to write something meaningful, something insightful and clever and wise—and you find that these insights are actually quite difficult to put on the page, even if you understand them as well as you think you do. Which is rarely the case. All of which is to say that this is a cute story best given to a child between ten and fifteen. A young girl for preference, after she’s finished something challenging and needs a literary cinnamon bun to pick her up As for myself, I have a stash of these to warm me after reading tragedies or parting ways with a romantic partner. It’s the former, right now, and it’s quite served it’s purpose. I can go back to the heart rending memoir of an abusive lesbian relationship.
