RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleUsing multiple narrative voices and regular flashbacks, the plot unfolds fanlike, from the middle. Where some authors risk frustrating the reader with several narratives, Levy uses the technique like a prose conductor. She cues her characters with precision and skillfully extracts their individual timbres and rhythms: Hortense's accounts are tense and idiosyncratic; her husband's mellifluous and enchanting; Queenie speaks brashly from a big heart; Bernard's voice is mortally wounded … The most memorable passages of Small Island are those in which a moment of tranquility leaps to the brink of catastrophe and lands on the safe side of devastation without a discernible deep breath from the narrator … There is no doom in Small Island — only surprises, suffering and deliverance.
