Praise for Little and Edward Carey
“A delightfully strange portrait of a young orphan honing her eccentric craft amid the tumult of the French Revolution. Carey’s flair for macabre whimsy has drawn comparisons to Tim Burton (take a look at the illustrations and you can see why). While death haunts this story, between vibrant characters and riveting historical detail, Little is a novel that teems with life.” —Time
“Sparkling, bizarre [and] several years in the making.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Edward Carey writes wonderfully weird books about wonderfully weird things. This one imagines the life of Madame Tussaud—of wax museum fame—as a little girl. It’s a hefty historical novel that promises to be a pageturner, too.” —Celeste Ng
“One of the most original historical novels of the year. . . . Macabre, funny, touching and oddly life-affirming, Little is a remarkable achievement.” —The Times (London)
“A wonderfully weird exploration of spectacles, from wax heads to revolutions, that will delight lovers of the macabre.” —BookPage
“Dark and delightful, playful and peculiar, Little is Edward Carey’s absorbing, fictional re-creation of Madame Tussaud’s early life… Carey’s spirited style brings a lightness to Marie’s bleak days and a whimsy to her brighter ones. He blends dark humor with a puckish tone for a story that’s simply magnetic… Little is big in many ways: creativity, energy, concept and character. Leave plenty of room in your heart for this one; you’ll need it.” —Shelf Awareness
“A startlingly original novel.” —The Times of London, Book of the Month
“A wildly creative reimagining of the work and life of an artist more associated with George Clooney than Maximilien Robespierre. Admirers of Gregory Maguire will be delighted.” –Library Journal (starred)
“Carey channels the ghosts of Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, and the Brothers Grimm to tell Marie’s tale, populating it with grotesques and horrors worthy of Madame Tussaud’s celebrated wax museum… A quirky, compelling story that deepens into a meditation on mortality and art.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“There is nothing ordinary about this book, in which everything animate and inanimate lives, breathes, and remembers. Carey, with sumptuous turns of phrase, fashions a fantastical world that churns with vitality, especially his “Little,” a female Candide at once surreal and full of heart.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred)
“An immensely creative epic…Mingling a sense of playfulness with macabre history, Carey depicts the excesses of wealth and violence during the French Revolution through the eyes of a talented woman who lived through it and survived…The unique perspective, witty narrative voice, and clever illustrations make for an irresistible read.” —Booklist (starred)
“Don’t miss this eccentric charmer! Little, by Edward Carey, narrated by Madame Tussaud of waxworks fame, [on] her strange life and times, including the almost fatal French Revolution, a prime season for heads.” —Margaret Atwood, on Twitter
“Little is bawdy, tragic, mesmerizing, hilarious. If you’ve forgotten why you’d even read a novel, Edward Carey is here to set you straight.” —Alexander Chee
“Little is exquisitely sensitive to all the warmth, vigor, humor, woe, and peculiarities of human nature, as if the writer had a dowsing rod capable of divining what hides within the human heart. Carey is without peer.” —Kelly Link
“A deliciously disturbing treasure of a novel. Sensual, unassumingly poignant, heartbreaking, cruel, joyous: Edward Carey’s Little is a triumph and one of the most intoxicating novels I’ve read. I never wanted to leave Marie’s side.” —Sarah Schmidt
“An amazing achievement…A compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself.”
—Gregory Maguire, New York Times bestselling author of Wicked
