I would give this 3.75 stars. It was interesting. To hear my full thoughts on this one, stay tuned for my August 2020 Wrap Up Vlog on my YouTube channel called Completely Melanie. ( )

This novel gets two stars because, from a sheer technical standpoint, Tabitha King can write.

Unfortunately, no matter how well things are described, no matter the actual quality of the writing, it doesn't make up for a meandering, slow story that, for pages and pages and pages, simply goes nowhere. And from a plotting and pacing standpoint, King made some very odd choices.

Why not have someone wake up in the White House, and slowly, to their horror, realize they're not in the real one, but a small-scaled model? Then the story can go back and dig into how they got there. Instant mystery, instant intrigue.

Instead, King goes for a good opening fraction of the book before any of this stuff comes up. And when it does, I'm sorry, but I simply could not get past the absolute unbelievability of this device that shrinks things down. I mean, for all intents and purposes, it's a damn camera. But it knows exactly what you want shrunk and it shrinks only that? And it just happens to shrink things to the specific size of an already-built scale model of the White House? Like, bang on?

And King seemed to not be able to decide on the exact size of her shrunken characters. Could they fit into a match box? Or were they inches tall? It seemed rather fluid through the novel.

But overall, the greatest sin of this novel? Aside from a fun little nod to hubby's The Shining, this book was quite boring. Which is why it took me damn near two weeks to read a 329-page novel, the last third of that in one sitting today just to clear it from my task list. Because, by this point, it was a task. ( )

Felt a little more outdated then my taste. Wanted to like it, but characters were not super interesting for me. ( )

Small World is a story about obsession, greed and miniature dollhouses -- something along the line of The Incredible Shrinking Woman.

Tabitha King's background in poetry is very obvious in her choice of words in this book. Her descriptions were wonderful, and her dialogue was smooth and flowing. Very believable interactions between characters. Nice transitions between scenes and ideas.

My only complaint would be that it took 150 pages too long to get into the suspense and intrigue of the story. The beginning groundwork, with her skills, could have been pared down to a minimum and would have tightened the anxiety level for the reader. Weaving all the characters backgrounds was tedious to get through and I had to force myself to keep picking up the book.

One discrepancy I saw was a scene where a character has been shrunk and bites into fake fruit made of scented dough that at first glance, seems so real. Unfortunately, the character who invented the dough, Lucy, had just shown her latest creation to the owner of the dollhouse, Dorothy, and Dorothy was not impressed nor did she take any dough or fruit samples with her as she and her scientist boyfriend knew they could shrink the real thing if they wanted too. They actually were amused by her play dough. So, how did that fruit get in the dollhouse? Maybe I missed something? It figures prominently in a scene, so I got hung up on that detail.

Also, I'm not quite sure if I can suspend disbelief and go with the ending. I closed the book with a ton of questions--how? who? where? when? why? Could it work? But, maybe questioning is a good thing.

Again, the mechanics of the story were impressive. All you writers out there could take a lesson or two from this work. I would recommend the story as long as you know it really takes dedication to get to the meat. ( )