Lalani Sarita lives in a world dominated by men. They achieve this status principally through their physical size. Everyone admires this quality, and Lalani feels diminished because she isn’t big and muscle-bound. All the women on the island are judged as useless because of their comparatively small size. They fall into the trap of believing in their own worthlessness and allow men to order them around. The novel stresses the folly of judging effectiveness by physical brawn. Drum is big, but he is also a bully who is disliked by his own family as well as the rest of the villagers. When Lalani contemplates how to save her mother, she finds the task daunting because she doesn’t perceive herself as a hero: All the heroes she has known are big men, not little girls. However, the novel stresses that size doesn’t matter when it comes to power. There are multiple situations in which something tiny can bring down the gigantic and supposedly powerful.

The first example is the bacteria that causes mender’s disease. A single scratch from an infected needle can kill a human in 10 days. Likewise, a single bite from a tiny goyuk is enough to kill Lalani if she doesn’t reach

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