The Fortunate Misadventures of a Gadfly

If "A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is really kinda about Beltane, and "The Tempest" had a love-child, it might be "Little, Big" by John Crowley. It came out in 1981 and is in the  same Fantasy realm of world-building as Charles DeLint. I can definitely see how one must have influenced the other - very much so. How ever did it escape my radar until now? If you aren't accustomed to reading pithy works with long complicated sentences it can be a brain workout and hard to follow, but very interesting and full of the most wonderful vocabulary I haven't seen used in a very very long time. Like having been starved and not known it. Cartomancy, familiars, The Good People, and the Not-So-Good People, Brownies, The Wyrd Sister - literally - changelings, houses that are portals to There from Here....all co-existing in the nitty and gritty of the everyday world. Wonderful stuff. Not an actiony sort of book we are told is what you ought to write these days, this is very expositive and dialogu-ey. And it works. But it works because it draws you in and you have to work at it for a while as the story unfolds around you while you open up into it. Somehow it draws you in and you go to sleep in it while you wake up in it....it's dreamy like that... Just as your eyes kinda cross and you slip sideways into Faery.... Go for it.

I requested this book from my library when I read and article about the monuments men in the latest edition of Smithsonian Magazine. I was gripped from the Prologue and haven't been able to put it down.