Small Miracles

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Holly is absolutely lovely, yet complicated, and her childhood traumas have influenced her adult life, and hold the sad key to why she is so staunch in her virtue. It’s just that… I could swear that you were… weren’t you a woman before?“ Gadriel blinked. “Oh!” he said. “I forgot entirely. I suppose most people don’t just change that when they feel like it?”🖊️ We meet Gadriel using her small powers of persuasion to shorten a queue of customers before meeting her unfallen counterpart, Barachiel the Angel of Good Fortune. As they catch up over coffee Atwater sneaks in references to the story’s central plot device – the accounting of sin. As with the charming TV show The Good Place Gadriel and Barachiel are involved in the maintenance of celestial balance sheets, you might think of it as the accountancy of sin (not to be confused with the sin of accountancy), with chocolate counting as ½ a point of sin, while heartfelt compliments and other modest good deeds earn points of virtue. In 1990, two iconic fantasy authors, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, collaborated to write the famed novel “Good Omens” (full title: “Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch”. And, I absolutely adore the theme of gods or demi-gods or beings such as angels, interfering with the lives of mortals, and producing unplanned-for results. The overriding sense here is one of hope and optimism, and despite Gadriel meddling to try and tempt Holly to sin, you know everything is going to work out for the best, in the end.

Let me start by saying I was amused and entertained throughout Small Miracles. The idea of a Fallen Angel of Petty Temptation who fell from grace because of their own gambling problem is quite charming. Gadriel, said fallen angel, is in deep with their bookie, Barachiel, the Angel of Good Fortune.Whimsy and satire is employed in highly effective fashion by Atwater to convey some fairly stark and challenging themes in the book. Love, loss, grief, death, forgiveness, redemption, family. Atwater shows a very deft hand in handling these issues.

The text is peppered with Pratchett-esque footnotes. These fall into two categories, the first being authorial asides that raise a smile, or an eyebrow or both, for example the one about how 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.Atwater takes slice of life, regular folk’s existence that has more depth than at first realized, combined with playfully misbehaving angels doing petty pranks that turn out to have bigger consequences, compelling themes handled light and very adroitly, brilliant characters, wonderful prose, satire, and that cozy feel that is so popular right now, to spin an absolute delight of a novel. a b Hamilton, Jenny (July 26, 2022). "How to (Not) Fit In: The Misfit Heroine and Olivia Atwater's". Tor.com. Archived from the original on August 18, 2022 . Retrieved March 2, 2023.

Associating virtue with misery and sin with enjoyment might take old fashioned weight loss messaging a little too far or too simplistically into the moral domain. However, it makes for an interesting set-up as Gadriel finds the simple challenge has some surprising complications. It also means that each chapter opens, like a Bridget Jones diary entry, with a helpful running score of Holly Harker’s cumulative sin metric. (She starts on “-932” sin points – positively brimming with virtue). 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. I am currently working on a Victorian faerie tale, however, which I’m very excited about! Now that I’m writing in the Victorian era, I get to explore the gothic genre, which is a bit darker. I still have some whimsy and some humour in the book, but I also get to flavour it more like a ghost story, and add a bit more gallows humour to it. The characters are allowed to be a bit more flawed, and the atmosphere feels more dangerous. This first Victorian faerie tale takes a lot of inspiration from the movie Labyrinth —so if you had a thing for David Bowie in eyeliner taunting the young heroine, this one might be for you. This is so far outside of my wheelhouse that I'm not going to rate it, as it would be unfair to do so.

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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.

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, This is NOT a review of that book. Yet unavoidably, there will be comparisons between “Small Miracles” by Atwater, and that seminal work by Gaiman and Pratchett. Nielsen, Rune S. "Author Interview: Olivia Atwater". runesnielsen.com. Archived from the original on October 15, 2022 . Retrieved March 2, 2023. Being set in modern-day London, there isn’t much worldbuilding per se, and a lot of that happens in footnotes. Some might find that insufficient or annoying, personally, I enjoyed the added tidbits and religious references. 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 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.