SPFBO Champions: Small Miracles by Olivia Atwater

Welcome to the SPFBO Champions’ League! As you know, this is a special edition where we try to find out who will be the ultimate Champion among the last 10 SPFBO winners. Check out our SPFBO Chamopions’ League page for more info! SPFBO Champions’ League ends on December 20th, and we’ll post our reviews every 3 weeks or so.

Our 5th SPFBO Champion review is for Small Miracles by Olivia Atwater, the winner of SPFBO 8. The reviews within a post will be in alphabetical order.

A quick reminder about how we are proceeding in this edition: our judges had the freedom to opt out of reading any of the books due to personal interest, time restrictions, unforeseen life events, etc. Our aim is to have at least 4 reviews/scores for each Champion.

Once again, we’ll have a DNF rule in place: if a judge reads a book (if they didn’t opt out beforehand), they have to read at least 25% of it, although encouraged to read at least 50% since we are talking about champions. At whichever point they DNF, they’ll have to write a review and put a score in our spreadsheet.

As per the new rules for the SPFBO Champions’ Editidon, there aren’t going to be any public scores, but we’ll have them to help us decide the ranking. However, they won’t be shared anywhere. We will also have a mixed set of old and new reviews, meaning that if any of us reviewed a book before, we can reuse that review. Therefore, we’ll mark our reviews at the beginning as old or new.

For Small Miracles, we have 5 reviews for your reading pleasure.

So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at our 5th Champion!

Table of Contents

• About the Book
• Book Blurb
• Reviews
  • Arina
  • Drew
  • Rari
  • Timy
  • Tru

Alittle bit of sin is good for the soul.

Gadriel, the fallen angel of petty temptations, has a bit of a gambling debt. Fortunately, her angelic bookie is happy to let her pay off her debts by doing what she does best: All Gadriel has to do is tempt miserably sinless mortal Holly Harker to do a few nice things for herself.

What should be a cakewalk of a job soon runs into several roadblocks, however, as Miss Harker politely refuses every attempt at temptation from Gadriel the woman, Gadriel the man, and Gadriel the adorable fluffy kitten. When even chocolate fails to move Gadriel’s target, the ex-guardian angel begins to suspect she’s been conned. But Gadriel still remembers her previous job… and where petty temptations fail, small miracles might yet prevail.

Olivia Atwater explores love, grief, and the very last bit of chocolate in this sweet modern fantasy, full of wit and heart. Pick up Small Miracles, and enjoy a heavenly faerie tale from the author of Half a Soul.

Arina

Read: 100%
Review: Old

Small Miracles is a quirky, cosy tale capering outside conventional fantasy roads. It’s not a story about the world’s fate, and it doesn’t deal in the customary high stakes, or rather, it does deal in high stakes somehow but turns them all inside, towards the very core of its characters.

It pairs well with readers who enjoy their fantasy bordering contemporary and romance, a good cocktail of enough elements of all these genres that it’d fully satisfy a fan. I personally find myself drifting from that persona, and too much focus on romance in my fantasy tends to weary me, which happened in some parts.

But if you’re like me, don’t be discouraged. As it borrows some character tropes, mythology and a hearty amount of sarcasm from Good Omens, Olivia Atwater’s Small Miracles delights with its eccentric characters, explorations of gender expression, and magic system based on the reward and penalty of sins and virtues.

While it uses mythological themes commonly associated with good and evil (heavenly angels, fallen angels, and terrifying personifications of hellish deities), it never attempts to unequivocally define them. 

In fact, one of the best things about this book is how it manages to blur such lines, taking the reader through a journey into the most intimate parts of its protagonists. Through their uncertainty, laughter, and sorrow, it becomes a story all of its own, with a little too much worldbuilding going on in the footnotes instead of in narrative for my liking, but that’s on personal preference.

Everything about it is small, and though it’s a bit inevitable that such a word will spring to mind only its negative connotations, Small Miracles does a great job of reminding the reader that the greatest pleasures nestle within the smallest of things.

Drew

Read: 100%
Review: new

Gadriel is a former guardian angel who, having previously delighted in the small miracles of the title, now specialises in the sort of petty temptations that everyone experiences. Indebted to their former boss, the angel Barachiel, Gadriel agrees to find a way of tempting Holly Harker into some minor sinning and having some more fun in her life. But it soon turns out that what was originally sold as a simple errand turns out to be much more involved and leads Gadriel to some overdue self-analysis. 

Gadriel is frequently witty and charming, with some key insights into human nature. They also flit back and forth between male and female forms (as well as a kitten at one point), something that the human characters barely acknowledge. They also have a very large sweet tooth, particularly for chocolate, which actually forms a plot point later on.

Although Gadriel would be considered the primary character, several chapters also come from Holly’s perspective. At first bemused by the sudden appearance of Gadriel in her life, she soon comes to rely on her new friend. As the main human character, she’s easy to understand and empathize with as she struggles with; well, to say more would stray into spoiler territory.

One thing that I particularly liked about the book is that, after the initial chapter, each is headed by Holly’s current sin level and ends with a tally of the sins and virtues Holly earned throughout. 

An obvious point of comparison is Good Omens, which the author acknowledges was an inspiration but Small Miracles feels more contained, focusing on the main characters rather than trying to expand its supernatural underpinnings. 

Given that it leans into the current trend for cozy fantasy, Small Miracles is not a book that I would normally have picked up on my own. So, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It’s a relatively short and straightforward read, with a couple of nice, unexpected turns.

Rari

Read: 100%
Review: old

I knew this one was the SPFBO champion and that it was similar to Good Omens. Well, there are similarities, naturally, but I found this was quite different from Good Omens. 

It is literally about the small things in life, small miracles, petty temptations, small pleasures, the little things that make life worth living for rather than world ending stakes. I loved the humour and the hope, and the characters. A great read.

Timy

Read: 100%
Review: old – another note: Small Miracles was QBA’s finalist (and my semi-finalist pick, not that I’m bragging…), and so my review was written for the semi-finals stage

I admit, Small Miracles was one of the books in our batch that instantly caught my attention. When I reached the “fallen angel” part in the blurb, I was sold. Mentioning angels is a sure way to perk up my attention. I’ve never read Olivia Atwater‘s books before, although I’ve heard a lot about Half a Soul and intended to read it at some point.

This book focuses on Gadriel (not to be mistaken for Gabriel), a fallen angel of petty temptations, who has strong views on chocolate not being a sin. As a favor for their heavenly sibling, Barachiel, Gadriel agrees to tempt Holly Harker to sin some, which sounds simple enough, but we know things are never simple. As Gadriel tries to figure out what is going on, they get to discover some long-lost parts of themselves.

Gadriel is a fun and interesting character, and a flawed one as you might expect from a fallen angel. At first, I found it weird that everyone took it in stride when one moment he appeared male, then female, without asking questions much, then again, who are we to question how others want to appear? Ultimately, I liked that Holly, her niece and everyone else around them just accepted Gadriel as they are. Which is one of the messages of this book, although probably not the main one. Still.

Being set in modern-day London, there isn’t much worldbuilding per se, and a lot of that happens in footnotes. Some might find that insufficient or annoying, personally, I enjoyed the added tidbits and religious references.

Small Miracles is a short book with 250 pages that can be easily read in a day or over a weekend. What I found refreshing about it is that it has a bit of a slice-of-life feel to it. The conflicts are small scale, there is no world-threatening big baddy, no imminent war on the horizon. It’s about the life of a family who knew grief and has no idea how to mend the gap between them. It’s about love and friendship and self-discovery and acceptance of others. In short, it’s a book that pushes all the right buttons for me.

Tru

Read: 100%
Review: new

I’ve got to be honest; I’m not the biggest fan of cozy fantasy. I’ve tried to read the more popular ones, but I usually find them rather boring as there’s little happening other than the characters sitting around drinking tea. The characters themselves are often too sickly sweet for my tastes. I like a little bit of deviousness, a little bit of suffering. Enter Gadriel then, a fallen angel once responsible for small miracles and now in charge of minor temptations and sins, such as eating that last bit of chocolate. Unfortunately, they’ve got gambling debts to pay, and to help pay them off, Gadriel’s angelic bookie has given them a fairly simple job – tempt a human lady named Holly into some minor sins to help boost their sin matrix. But it turns out that Holly might be the most virtuous woman in London, and none of Gadriel’s usual tricks are working.

I instantly fell for Gadriel’s grumpier personality and wit as they struggled to understand Holly and what it would take to make her sin. I especially loved Gadriel’s interactions with their bookie and fellow angel Barachiel, especially when meeting for hot chocolate at the local coffee shop Holly works at. It’s a faux pas for angels to be wearing the same gender, and I appreciated how queer friendly Small Miracles and its cast is. Gadriel would often swap genders like swapping clothes, and the rest of the cast simply went along with it, as they should.

There’s a lot of humour in this story which rightly draws comparisons to Good Omens. There’s also a lot of footnotes, too, but I didn’t find these intrusive. In fact, I think reading this on an ereader gives one of the better experiences, as I could simply tap on the footnote and read a popup. As with most stories featuring angels, humans and their silly human issues are the heart of the plot, but this story is also full of heart. There were times where I legitimately teared up. Small Miracles has the right balance of cozy and deeper themes that satisfied my darker side.

Small Miracles is a shorter book at less than 300 pages, which made this read feel like the perfect treat. Best indulged with some chocolate. It would be a sin not to.

For more SPFBO content, please visit our SPFBO Champions’ League page!