Little World opens with the body of a child saint stranded in the Australian desert. Her name is unknown, as is the story of her life and the status of her canonization. She arrives in a box made of canoe timber, and Orrin Bird is dressed in his best clothes to receive her. As the novel sweeps across time and place, from the 1950s to the present day, we encounter the long shadow of the saint in many forms.
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.
