I am a fan of The Borrowers, so I looked forward to this story of tiny people in Japan.

Unfortunately, while it is an interesting portrait of war-time Japan, it has a slow and meandering plot, with relatively flat characters and somewhat inexplicable parameters. We hear, for instance, that the small people must be given milk and only milk, but that does not appear to be true later on. Also, there is a timeframe that must be met before they can return to their large people and that is oddly arbitrary. There is never an explanation for so many things about the small people, and the adult tinies seem, passive, relatively helpless, and not particularly helpful or kind to their large caretakers.

I think if Miyazaki turned it into a film, I might enjoy it, but short of that, it has little to recommend it, and has failed to capture the joy and intrigue of the lives of tiny people.

Advanced reader's copy provided by Edelweiss. ( )