Swoony, atmospheric ... Early passages shine with the promise of a delicately entwined story to come ... If the end feels disappointing...it’s because it doesn’t quite live up to the vast possibilities Rowe has conjured through her affecting, sensual, otherworldly prose ... Early passages from within the saint’s semi-consciousness are particularly beautiful. Rowe’s descriptions are sure-footed and surprising ... Every word is prized and imbued with clear intention, yet the novel’s sum doesn’t quite live up to its parts, the lovely lines and the thoughts and gaping needs of its characters.
Intricate, intimate and short ... This book feels hollow, as though the desert termites have been at it ... There’s no question that Little World is beautiful ... A tiny treasure box ... But if you’re going to stuff a kid into a box—even a treasure box—that kid deserves to be more than a gauzy metaphor ... I am also tired...of tales of lost girls in the bush ... I can’t work out what has brought Rowe here. Which is another way of saying that I don’t know why she has brought us here.
Strange ... A chronicle of the unmoored lives touched by this small, sanctified body and the funny, observant, determinedly unsanctified spirit tied to it. At just more than 100 pages, it’s the kind of concise, precisely sketched novel that you can read in one sitting, coming away with a sense of having been briefly but profoundly transported ... A sort of elevating, spiritual dance in language ... Rowe...is a challenging writer. A lover of language that is somehow simultaneously rich and sparse, she wants readers to work for the conclusions they draw ... There are times when the obscurity of this kind of imagery frustrates; it can seem too caught up in its own abstruse loveliness to really mean anything. But more frequently, it brings an unexpected and revelatory sharpness to the unfamiliar world Rowe describes ... Short and dense, full of emotion but also set at a slight perceptive remove.
A compact, sacred marvel of a book ... Rowe has a habit of dropping pronouns and articles, truncating sentences; it gives her writing a spare quality, something like grace ... Rowe’s writing, too, has a compressed, consecrated, chronostratigraphic sound ... There is a sense of holy mystery to the story.
Radiant ... Composed with poetic fury, the book alludes to violence while pronouncing evidence of feminine vivaciousness. Even its treatments of the ordinary simmer ... Sumptuous.
Rowe’s writing is rich in atmosphere and reads as if channeled directly from the minds of others in short, sturdy sentences ... A human yet otherworldly tale.
Lyrical if diffuse ... Rowe’s language is arresting, particularly in her depictions of the saint...but she doesn’t quite elucidate her themes or illuminate her characters’ inner lives. Rowe is a consummate stylist, but this doesn’t make much of an impact.
