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Sixteen-year-old Morris, upset over his parents' separation, is dumped by his mother on his Uncle Patrick. His uncle has a beautiful model castle with model people, which is part of a video game he bought and/or is testing for the company, I'm not sure which. How the video game and models interact is another matter which I never understood. Morris discovers that the model people, who are enacting a medieval war or rebellion (also very unclear) are alive/intelligent. How this works, you will possibly be unsurprised to learn, is never explained.
With the cooperation of a friend of his uncle's and the alternating cooperation/objections of Uncle Patrick, Morris watches the game unfold while falling in love with a tiny rebel woman who thinks he's God. There are clearly supposed to be parallels between the game and Morris's life, but the only one that I understood was that love is good and Morris should welcome his parents getting back together. Not sure that this parallel really worked as 1) him falling in love with a tiny model medieval woman had no parallel with his parents' relationship other than "heterosexual love," 2) admittedly we only see his parents through his obviously biased eyes but in terms of actual objective behavior, they both suck, 3) having his lady love think he's God was a giant (so to speak) ???WTF??? relevance??? all the way through.
Morris is extremely passive and dislikes everything and everyone (except his tiny lady), but in a kind of detached, vague cloud of unhappiness manner. His uncle's friend tries to befriend him and ends up introducing their mothers to each other; this possibly leads to his parents reconciling. But this doesn't help as much with the parallels as you'd think, as Morris has nothing to do with it, Morris never befriends him himself, and the only relationship with the game is that's how they met. His uncle's characterization was all over the map. It never made sense to me how the game worked even on a very literal level like how the real model was also a computer game, how the magical aspect worked, where the game came from, or why it was magic/an AI.
The model people deactivate and become plastic when they leave the model, so they never interact with a giant modern world (which was why I bought the book!)
On a tiny people level and on all other levels, it disappointed.
Under siege
With the cooperation of a friend of his uncle's and the alternating cooperation/objections of Uncle Patrick, Morris watches the game unfold while falling in love with a tiny rebel woman who thinks he's God. There are clearly supposed to be parallels between the game and Morris's life, but the only one that I understood was that love is good and Morris should welcome his parents getting back together. Not sure that this parallel really worked as 1) him falling in love with a tiny model medieval woman had no parallel with his parents' relationship other than "heterosexual love," 2) admittedly we only see his parents through his obviously biased eyes but in terms of actual objective behavior, they both suck, 3) having his lady love think he's God was a giant (so to speak) ???WTF??? relevance??? all the way through.
Morris is extremely passive and dislikes everything and everyone (except his tiny lady), but in a kind of detached, vague cloud of unhappiness manner. His uncle's friend tries to befriend him and ends up introducing their mothers to each other; this possibly leads to his parents reconciling. But this doesn't help as much with the parallels as you'd think, as Morris has nothing to do with it, Morris never befriends him himself, and the only relationship with the game is that's how they met. His uncle's characterization was all over the map. It never made sense to me how the game worked even on a very literal level like how the real model was also a computer game, how the magical aspect worked, where the game came from, or why it was magic/an AI.
The model people deactivate and become plastic when they leave the model, so they never interact with a giant modern world (which was why I bought the book!)
On a tiny people level and on all other levels, it disappointed.
Under siege
