These are both okay fantasy novels, middling for their respective genres, I'm not likely to remember the characters or the worlds on their own. Reading them back-to-back pointed up something about the genres, though.
Many British fantasy writers, melting away from the style of George Macdonald and Lord Dunsany, are producing an excellent tradition of sardonic, pull-the-other one fantasy; Terry Pratchett, Tom Holt, Mary Gentle's Grunts, Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. They often have happy-enough endings, but not very grand ones: happy enough to survive the battles of unearthly powers, no need to become one. You could put in Recessional as an endpiece, and it would usually fit.
The Minneapolis school, which probably has a name I don't know, feeds a style of fantasy that too often pretends to be gritty and realist but then wraps things up in a made-for-TV plot conclusion. I particularly dislike being able to tell in the first chapters of a book which characters are going to die in order for the hero to get less stupid. I like some of the Minneapolis school's books a lot; but the good ones I can think of are good not because they avoid the triumphal ending, but because they provide convincing reason for it. Nor does it have to be logically convincing; it's all escapism.
No, when the punk-elf Americans disappoint me, it's usually because the character development is dim. This particular subgenre sends a lonesome tough-but-basically-innocent young person to the streets of the Big City, where they discover that elves are glamorously running the rock music/streetlife/stock car racing trade, and also discover that elves really really need a tough-but-basically-innocent young person, who has more power than s/he thinks. I am not immune to this plot as a wish-fulfilment, but if badly done it should be left to Marvel Comics' Teenage Mutant X-Men Together, or whatever they're doing this decade. It can't be carried off with much pretense to realism, because it takes a lot of effort for even enormously talented real people to affect history, unless you drag in the divine right of kings or midichlorians. The Last Hot Time doesn't do anything nearly that distasteful; the world clearly needs a nice-ish guy, and our nice-ish guy steps in and takes some risks and does some suffering, but... I just wasn't convinced. If being fundamentally decent was that important, it's not clear to me that the protagonist is more decent than some of the characters there already; and I didn't see any sufficient change in the character himself. The prose is tidy but flat from beginning to end.
The Little People does something more complicated in the prose; the first-person narrator is something of an Adrian Mole nebbish, but grows up over the course of the book. In the first few chapters the nebbishness is so irritating that I nearly quit, but he's a smart nebbish, so there were occasional cracks of laughter. Somewhere more than half through I noticed that the prose and the character's understanding had both grown up; it was then a much better book. The irruptions of elfdom - to a shoe-factory, just to keep the gritty theme sensible - are slightly tedious and mechanical, but the character is ambivalent enough about what he ought to do that the little-green-men set-pieces didn't bother me.
And, in the end, he gets some but not all of the dangerous decisions right: gritty realism, only mildly diluted. Gentle will give you grit undiluted - you can pity her orcs without liking them at all, and one of her novels ends exactly the way Foolish Mortals against Unearthly Powers ought to end, very like the Ring cycle. The operas. I won't tell you which one; you should read them all, and each with increasing nerves as the telltale compression of the pages begins.
Holt has written better novels and worse; I prefer Here Comes the Sun, for instance.
The perfect innocent-young-person-saves-the-world fantasy novel is
Diana Wynne Jones' The Homeward Bounders, of course. US
readers should nip out and get it, it's on drugstore shelves with a
perfectly inoffensive cover, and that's two things to encourage.
So wrote clew in
SF&F.