I took a stab at something newly published and completely outside of my comfort zone. In all honesty, it wasn’t a total wash; “Little Nothing” comes in at a solid 3.
Pavla is born a dwarf to agrarian parents living somewhere in Eastern Europe right before the outbreak of World War I. The industrial age is just beginning to dawn on her small farming community, and there and many of the villages surrounding her town still conduct daily activity with a fairly Medieval mindset, meaning that Pavla the Dwarf doesn’t have the best life.
Her parents are doting and loving until Pavla reaches the age of fifteen, and her parents fear for the future of her fertility. They begin taking her to all the charlatan ‘healers’ of the day, subjecting her from everything to laxatives and stretching exercises to burying her up to her neck like a carrot in an effort to make her grow taller so that she will be more attractive to the neighborhood boys. Through these visits she meets Danilo, a quack-doctor’s assistant, who becomes intensely interested in the dwarf girl. This is where the story takes a strange turn….and I won’t spoil it for you, but the lack of explanation about this specific turn of events made it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief for the rest of the book.
Pavla and Danilo are separated after this turn of events, and Danilo spends the rest of the book trying to find her, while she loses her memory and only knows that she has to get back to her parents somehow. Intermingled into this story is a fairy-tale version of the werewolf, philosophical epiphanies about the states of ‘being’ or ‘not being’, and the dawn of the industrial age’s toll on an agrarian society mixed with the terrors of war.
Perhaps this book tried to take on too much in 300 pages; perhaps the fantastical elements in it were not explained enough for me to enjoy them, perhaps this book was just a little too weird for me.
I wouldn’t say to stay away from this book however; it was a pleasant and fast read with nice prose and likeable characters, and I would love to know what some other readers think of it!