In Little, Big, Crowley muses over the intersection of childhood innocence, fantasy and faith, in part by describing the disappearance of actual fairies. The chalky endless feeling of grief might be rendered by a character who begins actually consuming chalk and dirt. To me, magical realism is beautiful in part because of its literalism: a broken heart might, in a book by Garcia Marquez, literally break.

People sometimes describe magical realism as 'heightened' or 'elevated' reality, but I think that's inaccurate, or at least inexact. Some passages are underlined almost in their entirety: Over the course of three months, as I moved through the book - incredibly, painstakingly slowly, eager for it to go on and on - I marked up the pages with an intricate spider web of notes, underlines and exclamation points. I often read on a Kindle when I travel, but I'm grateful that she sent a hard copy. It arrived in the mail from my friend Natasha, accompanied by a lone post-it note (she's not big on cards): This, she wrote, is the best contemporary work of magical realism I know. And to read it is to experience a kind of delightful unfolding, as new vistas, patterns, styles and connections continually emerge, and the story departs in wonderfully unanticipated directions. It also has elements of fable, fantasy and fairy tale - in the latter case, quite literally. It's a multi-generational epic and a work of magical realism, in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (another favorite of mine). Similarly, Little, Big feels like many books, and even many literary traditions within a vast, intricately organized novel. It unfolds, as the viewer circles around it, to reveal many different facades - Victorian, modern, gothic - like a complex piece of origami. Edgewood is designed by the patriarch, a renowned architect, to be many houses within a single structure.

John Crowley's Little, Big, an extraordinary, sweeping and strange novel, can perhaps be best described through the metaphor of its central setting: Edgewood, the house in which many generations (and permutations) of the Drinkwater family live.

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