When his adoptive father is killed by a bear, Tink is blamed. Forced to flee his childhood home, he faces economic exploitation, violence and—worst of all—loneliness In time, he makes a life for himself at the outskirts of a village in the Skanoh Valley. Cautiously, keeping to himself a good deal, he grows cash crops and barters them for supplies and tools. As the locals become more comfortable with him, he also begins using his unique mental talents to do the occasional good deed for his neighbors, who come to refer to him as "the foreigner" as a way of simultaneously dealing with his strangeness and denying it.

Kind, quiet and unassuming, Tink tends his plants, maintains a small cabin and gently resists the local preacher's efforts to convert him to Christianity. Then he is murdered—apparently by a stranger passing through town—and it throws the Skanoh Valley congregation of Jacob Piersol into an uproar. People rush to praise Tink's various good acts, while an upstart politician demands proof that the bizarre little man is really dead. The preacher, too, is troubled by the killing—and even more so by his failure to have saved Tink's soul.

So begins Nick DiChario's A Small and Remarkable Life, a low-key rumination on intolerance, loss, religious faith and the human need for connection with others.

Science fiction with a fairy-tale sensibility

Sweet in tone but with unfailingly savage content, A Small and Remarkable Life is simultaneously a biography of Tink Puddah and the story of his death and its fallout. As a youth, Tink flirts with the idea of hiding from humans entirely, but he cannot bear to live in complete solitude. His dilemma is powerful and poignant: Following the alien as he charts the limits of his neighbors' willingness to accept his difference is at once uplifting and sad.

Though A Small and Remarkable Life is technically an SF novel, it draws heavily on other genres: Tink's murder is a mystery in need of solution, while the author's decision to maroon his hero in the 19th century gives the story a nicely textured, historical-romance feel. Finally, Tink's gentle nature, status as orphan-pariah and physical strangeness all mark him as a creature of fairy tale: He has more in common with Cinderella than he does with E.T.

DiChario's writing is straightforward and mellow, rarely given to whimsy or poetic turns of phrase, but with a voice that will charm many readers. Tink himself is an admirable hero, a likable little guy who is often down on his luck and whose misfortunes are not of his own making. In the scenes where Tink is absent—when Preacher Piersol's search for answers is front and center—the story is far less compelling. That said, the truth Piersol finally uncovers has a genuine impact, one whose momentum drives A Small and Remarkable Life to end as it begins, mixing carnage with an unexpected thread of optimism and hope.