The Sizable Problems With an Interspecies Relationship by Belladonna Bryson, originally released in 2024 with a one-year anniversary edition out in March 2025, is a debut fantasy romance that reads like a love letter to the energy of mid-2000s teen fantasy. If you have ever wondered what would happen if Sky High, Zootopia, and a particularly imaginative Wattpad serial were thrown into a blender along with a dusting of sapphism, this is roughly the result. It’s a zany book with an equally zany title.
The Sizable Problems… is set in something that resembles our real world but with magic and a variety of fantasy races casually sprinkled in, with magical artifacts like spirit mirrors and love potions appearing as offhandedly as smartphones. It is also a book that does not take itself too seriously. Its protagonist is a half-inch-tall pixie studying for a degree in political science, which is not exactly a premise that screams classic, but it is competently written, heartfelt and charming throughout for anyone who enjoyed films like Wicked.
The story is set at Briro West University, a chaotic fictional college where humans, fae, minotaurs, half-unicorns, and various other hybrids all share the same hallways with predictably uneven results. Our narrator is Lyla, a fae who was originally three inches tall before a witch she briefly served as a “familiar” shrunk her down to half an inch. From her very first day at university, she has been bullied by Courtney Briro, the dean’s daughter, who clips Lyla’s wings with a hole puncher and leaves her in the path of a student stampede.
One day Lyla is rescued by Hestia, a gruff, blunt-smoking goth human classmate who scoops her into her purse and carries her to safety. From there a flirty friendship blooms into a relationship, until Courtney slips Lyla under a mind-control artifact that drives her to obsess over a secret project for months and ghost Hestia. It’s a plot, then, that is quite unlike anything you have likely read before. It is also a lesbian romance, which is refreshing. LGBT representation in urban fantasy is fairly rare, and what Bryson does particularly well is fold it into the texture of the book without ever making the entire story about the relationship being queer.
Probably the strongest element of the writing is the author’s depiction of being extraordinarily small. The book lingers in the texture of it: air conditioning blasts that nearly knock Lyla off a shoulder, fingers the size of cars, textbooks that are more expensive at her size rather than less, custom silverware she carries everywhere. It’s clear the author has put a lot of thought into how life would work at this miniscule size.
Tiny protagonists in fiction are often played for whimsy like in The Borrowers, so I enjoyed reading a book about the challenges of being a small fae here. The speciesism of the world is the book’s clearest thematic concern, and it works neatly as an analogy for any kind of treatment people receive for their height, their appearance, or simply being different. Lyla is constantly treated as inferior and treated like a bug, and you can’t help but feel for her plight.
The first-person narration of the book is the right call, giving us a great insight into Lyla’s POV, and the constant size-related logistics. This includes having to ask for a portion labelled “fae’s extra small” at the ice cream bar, having to ride her own pet dog Shadow to the prom. It all works best from inside her head. That said, you can’t help but wonder at times how on earth Lyla has not been killed yet, given how vulnerable she is (despite the explanation given of her abnormally quick healing ability).
The magic system is loose and cheerful, somewhere between Sabrina the Teenage Witch and a JRPG. The logic of it is not that important to the story, and at 160 pages the book leaves a lot left to explore in a potential sequel. Mana counters quite literally appear inline in the prose as Lyla casts spells (“450 Mana.”), and magical artifacts are tracked down with about as much ceremony as an Amazon order:
“Internet searches on magical artifacts that affected the mental clarity of fae came up with far too many search results to be helpful.”
There is also a surreal, funny quality to the writing that catches you off guard. The book tips sideways at unexpected moments, sometimes mid-scene, into something absurd: a pixie who funds her education by editing herself into pornography; a climactic prom rescue mounted on the back of a miniature poodle. The result is a tone that is hard to place but easy to enjoy, somewhere between earnest fantasy romance and a slightly off-kilter sitcom like Wizards of Waverly Place.
The central conflict tightens once Lyla and Hestia are actually together. Courtney, having lost both her favourite victim and her ex-girlfriend in the same week, slips Lyla under the influence of a magical artifact that alters her behaviour. Lyla begins a secret months-long project (a spirit mirror she means to give Hestia as a gift, so Hestia can speak with her parents). It’s a bit of a random plot conflict, but then again, most of the book is pretty random so it fits in that sense.
The book is not without its rougher edges. Its tone is genuinely all over the place, and while the surreal shifts are charming more often than not, there are stretches where the wacky energy works against the emotional beats it is trying to land. The mind-control arc also does a little too much work in absolving Lyla of her behaviour toward Hestia. Stella is probably my favourite character, though I would have liked to see more of her:
Stella was the best roommate I could dream of. A half human, half unicorn woman with a large horn coming out of her forehead, black hair going down to her shoulders, absolutely brilliant green eyes. She never looked down on me. No matter my size, she just saw me as her roomie… shame she was straight.
The supporting cast outside Stella, Hestia, and Courtney is a bit thinly sketched, and sometimes you wish the worldbuilding was more in-depth. Lastly, the prose has a handful of recurring tics such as internal exclamations (UGH!, DAMMIT!) and sometimes flurries of rhetorical questions Lyla fires at herself mid-scene (‘What in the hell was I talking about?’), which a sharper edit could have trimmed. None of these are dealbreakers so much as honest feedback.
In sum, The Sizable Problems With an Interspecies Relationship is a charming and thoughtful little book with a very wacky premise. The mix of sapphic romance, surreal comedy, casual magic, and a real undercurrent about how the world treats anyone smaller or who is different than the default gives the book substance while being fun to read. Bryson writes with a clear sense of what she wants the story to be, and that confidence carries the rougher patches along with the polished ones.
Final verdict: For fans of Sky High, Zootopia, and the more imaginative end of Wattpad or Royal Road fantasy, and queer fairytales that don’t take themselves too seriously, The Sizable Problems With an Interspecies Relationship is an entertaining, creative, and surpisingly affecting read.
You can get your copy of The Sizable Problems With an Interspecies Relationship here!
