What do you think?
Rate this book
Tiny
Tiny is a contemporary, poetic retelling of Sophocles' Antigone, set in the mossy greens and foggy grays of the Pacific Northwest. Instead of two brothers who kill each other in a civil war, Tiny has a brother who kills himself after coming home from a far-away war. Tiny is a teenage girl, and so is understandably messed up by death, she also understands it in a way that her dad and the government just can't. Tiny misses her brother, forever, but―with the help of her best friend Izzy, boyfriend Hank, and a collective dance night held in an old artificial limb store―she escapes freezing herself in grief, too. Using different perspectives and desires, facts from plants and history, and brass knuckles and Frankie Knuckles, Tiny wonders how we mourn and move, in time.
- GenresFictionYoung Adult
200 pages, Paperback
First published December 15, 2020
1 person is currently reading
112 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
October 29, 2021
There is a tiny dog in my house who we call Tiny as a nickname and he responds to it and he has probably grieved a lot in his life and it has made him tough, but not too tough.
I bought my copy of the book TINY at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. I guess TINY had been on my radar before, but I didn’t remember that. I just bought it because it had epigraphs from Tracy and the Plastics, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Donna Haraway.
while reading TINY I had that song stuck in my head where Sharon Van Etten says, "I used to be free. I used to be seventeen." In some ways, I was freer as a teenager than I am now. In other ways, I'm freer now. I've experienced a lot of loss since then. This book, TINY, speaks to both these selves, me now and many teenage mes, many mes in between.
In high school, I read Antigone and was told that Greek tragedy was designed to make the viewer experience catharsis. TINY definitely did.
Antigone/TINY examines individual human loss and the systems that loss is embedded in, without oversimplifying the relationship between bodies and systems. Since of course as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death." TINY helps me imagine a relationship to death, to grief and mourning, that is about individual bodies and selves, that isn't about blame or cause and effect or even fitting loss into a narrative other than: I loved this person. they are dead. I am alive. I remember them.
now let's go dancing.
I bought my copy of the book TINY at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. I guess TINY had been on my radar before, but I didn’t remember that. I just bought it because it had epigraphs from Tracy and the Plastics, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Donna Haraway.
while reading TINY I had that song stuck in my head where Sharon Van Etten says, "I used to be free. I used to be seventeen." In some ways, I was freer as a teenager than I am now. In other ways, I'm freer now. I've experienced a lot of loss since then. This book, TINY, speaks to both these selves, me now and many teenage mes, many mes in between.
In high school, I read Antigone and was told that Greek tragedy was designed to make the viewer experience catharsis. TINY definitely did.
Antigone/TINY examines individual human loss and the systems that loss is embedded in, without oversimplifying the relationship between bodies and systems. Since of course as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death." TINY helps me imagine a relationship to death, to grief and mourning, that is about individual bodies and selves, that isn't about blame or cause and effect or even fitting loss into a narrative other than: I loved this person. they are dead. I am alive. I remember them.
now let's go dancing.
August 11, 2022
This book is a work of art.
Honestly, you have to buy this book just to see how unique it is. The writing style is just... I can't explain but it's so brilliant and creative. I've never read anything like it before.
That being said, this is not a page turner, not a book you read for the fun of reading. This isn't like other books that exist to tell a story. Instead, it explores the the themes of grief, mourning, and moving on past tragedy.
I can definitely see myself coming back to this book in the future when I need these words to speak to me again 💕
Honestly, you have to buy this book just to see how unique it is. The writing style is just... I can't explain but it's so brilliant and creative. I've never read anything like it before.
That being said, this is not a page turner, not a book you read for the fun of reading. This isn't like other books that exist to tell a story. Instead, it explores the the themes of grief, mourning, and moving on past tragedy.
I can definitely see myself coming back to this book in the future when I need these words to speak to me again 💕
February 10, 2021
This is a lovely little book physically and especially in its writing. It took me right inside the life of a young person living with so many complexities—gender and nongender, love in all its forms, the complicated love of family, suicide, and particularly growing up in an atmosphere of continuous war—in a way that felt like speculative writing and hyperrealism at the same time.
February 5, 2021
I was recommended this by the folks over at Pilsen Community Books, and I can genuinely say that I wasn’t expecting this to be as affecting and close to home as it was. Which, I’m not sure why I thought that originally; at its core, Antigone is about death and grief, and peoples’ reactions to it. One of the first stagings of Antigone I saw was in the glass lobby of my college’s science building, in the skywalk, at night. Taking it, transplanting it to the Pacific Northwest, and making (An)Ti(go)n[y]’s brother a veteran who’s newly come home from the wars makes it hit all the harder. Tiny’s grief and her relationship with her father and brother is at the center of this, and the way Case writes this is beautiful and raw. The power of the dance party is also at the center of this, and one of the final, cathartic scenes in this reminds me of some of the best dance floors I’ve been on and their raw power. I was nervous about how this was going to end given the queer threads and the original text, but I love what Case decided to do here instead. Pick this up, and RESIST PSYCHIC DEATH
September 25, 2023
A truly beautiful book that evades description. Tiny is Antigone, reimagined into a dizzy, dreamlike wor(l)dscape of of queer childhood, unceasing grief, and love pocketed and stolen in those rare moments when "real life" fades.
A faceless chorus tells Tiny's story, which is accompanied by metacommentary on the world of and around the Greek Antigone, whose captivating power emerges from her ascetic determination to rise through the cracks of her own hurt. Tiny's story, whose context and results are less clear than her predecessor's, gains its context from a myriad of literary, community, and scholarly sources, giving the impression that Tiny's body stands in for a world of queer, Mad grief accumulated in a world at endless war. Lines, pages, and timelines are fractured. Visions mingle with "real" perceptions, and we are forced to cede control to Tiny's adventurous bodymind, letting ourselves slip into the river of her heart.
Recently, I read another Antigone retelling, Home Fire, which I found significantly lacking. Reading Tiny crystalized, for me, the reason why: Case's Antigone has a Madmind, a Madheart. She is not preoccupied with legibility, because she knows, implicitly, that illegibility is the hole in which she finds her life –– even if that hole will also be her death. Antigone is a character who crosses worlds and refuses to comply with the rational, recognizing it for the prison it is. Case, with Tiny, walks us into the realm of Madness and impenetrable grief as a kind of politics, and unlocks this political potential in the unsuspecting medium of a hybrid-poetic text, in the unfathomable power that sits in the body of a young girl.
A faceless chorus tells Tiny's story, which is accompanied by metacommentary on the world of and around the Greek Antigone, whose captivating power emerges from her ascetic determination to rise through the cracks of her own hurt. Tiny's story, whose context and results are less clear than her predecessor's, gains its context from a myriad of literary, community, and scholarly sources, giving the impression that Tiny's body stands in for a world of queer, Mad grief accumulated in a world at endless war. Lines, pages, and timelines are fractured. Visions mingle with "real" perceptions, and we are forced to cede control to Tiny's adventurous bodymind, letting ourselves slip into the river of her heart.
Recently, I read another Antigone retelling, Home Fire, which I found significantly lacking. Reading Tiny crystalized, for me, the reason why: Case's Antigone has a Madmind, a Madheart. She is not preoccupied with legibility, because she knows, implicitly, that illegibility is the hole in which she finds her life –– even if that hole will also be her death. Antigone is a character who crosses worlds and refuses to comply with the rational, recognizing it for the prison it is. Case, with Tiny, walks us into the realm of Madness and impenetrable grief as a kind of politics, and unlocks this political potential in the unsuspecting medium of a hybrid-poetic text, in the unfathomable power that sits in the body of a young girl.
December 30, 2020
“Keep me safe, Tiny says sometimes. // Inside her head or on paper.”
This novel delves deep into the experience of grief and pulls on the guidelines Tiny holds onto in the wake of her brother’s death. Case’s poetic instincts sing through these pages.
Reading this book in a pandemic winter—and I know this will sound corny—I found myself pulled into Tiny’s emotional world in a way that helped me feel some of the grief I’m holding in this moment.
This novel delves deep into the experience of grief and pulls on the guidelines Tiny holds onto in the wake of her brother’s death. Case’s poetic instincts sing through these pages.
Reading this book in a pandemic winter—and I know this will sound corny—I found myself pulled into Tiny’s emotional world in a way that helped me feel some of the grief I’m holding in this moment.
January 1, 2021
In a time of great and enduring grief, Mairead Case brings Antigone back, her queer heart adamant as ever. More than any other writer, I trust this one to bury our dead and let the grief live as love, aching and tremulous and radiating in all directions.
March 21, 2022
It's no secret I'm a fan of Mairead Case's writing. I enthusiastically offered to blurb her first novel and would have endorsed this too, therefore here I am. Case uses Antigone as the foundation for TINY, allows for a retelling to tell itself anew, a tradition I also covet (I did all my critical thesis work as an academic on the ways certain fairytales have evolved over time to reflect the culture telling them). Case writes the POV of young characters exquisitely well, and she simultaneously tackles tender subject matter with a tenderness I've never seen another writer summon to the page before the way she does. As a writer, I found a companion text in TINY. This second book of Case's is helping me find my way forward with a book I didn't mean to write.
April 19, 2021
This is beautiful little book with a big story of love, friendship and grief of the main character, Tiny. I’m not sure whether to classify the writing style as prose or poetry but it’s unlike anything I’ve ever read and that’s what made it so refreshing. The visualizations and flashbacks and the heavy grief Tiny feels after the suicide of her brother is heavy, but it’s also a story of hope and the light on the other side. Please buy this book and share with others. It’s a keeper and one I will reread.
May 19, 2022
TINY begins with a reminder to the reader: “Some of these people are dead, and some are alive. Some are in-between. Sometimes, it changes.”
This is the kind of grief narrative I want to see in the world—where loss isn’t something we move through, but a patient practice of unfolding, accepting, remaining, being with, being in-between, allowing, staying with. A disaster. A warp and weft. A web. The longest bus ride.
Mairead Case’s writing is beautiful—spare, spacious, tender, full of grief and also so much joy. Oh, this book. What a gift.
This is the kind of grief narrative I want to see in the world—where loss isn’t something we move through, but a patient practice of unfolding, accepting, remaining, being with, being in-between, allowing, staying with. A disaster. A warp and weft. A web. The longest bus ride.
Mairead Case’s writing is beautiful—spare, spacious, tender, full of grief and also so much joy. Oh, this book. What a gift.
May 16, 2021
Mairead's writing is always so simply lyrical - I never know how it is she manages to write in a way that sound both like "just the facts" but they slowly build into a larger cocoon of knowing, until a character is fleshed out. This one expands slowly in the beginning, and it is a pleasure to be along for that ride.
May 23, 2022
Sometimes you stumble upon something wondrous and unknown in the library.
This is a modern retelling of Antigone, very lyrical, pretty sad, kind of queer and a little bit hopeful. Do I need to say more?
This is a modern retelling of Antigone, very lyrical, pretty sad, kind of queer and a little bit hopeful. Do I need to say more?
June 1, 2021
A lovely, gentle, and confidently experimental meditation on grief. It's beautifully bound and formatted, too. I'll hang on to it because I expect I'll need it in the future.
December 23, 2021
No other book has made me cry on the bus. Legendary! "[Five] fucking stars!"
January 5, 2022
Not my usual fare, but beautifully written and . . . assembled? An eloquent look at military PTSD and death.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 14, 2023
Poetic / grief / form / play / inventive
August 23, 2023
It took me a little while to get into the writing style, but ended up being a very touching and poetic book.
April 14, 2024
heart breakingly human
May 30, 2025
Enjoyed it and thought it was a lovely read, but the structure didn’t do as much for me as it did for others. I had an ebook, and I wished for a paper copy at times because the actual layout of the page was a piece of the structure that I think I missed some of.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews