The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany BakerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County is a beautifully written novel about a subject that has been covered very often, but one that she handles in an interesting and unique way. It's about people coming to terms with who they are and living their lives to the fullest. The little giant, Truly Plaice, is one of those people. The book is written from her point of view, so we get to understand her issues more than the problems of the others. But there are also a gay man who has an authoritarian father, a young man who has always been mocked for being tiny, and Truly's sister Serena Jane who has to deal with the complications of physical beauty. Each one of these characters needs to find her or his way in the world, just like Truly.
The plot rambles a bit and I have to agree with the criticism I read in a few other reviews, that there is an unusual standard of good vs evil throughout the novel. But Tiffany Baker's prose is so wonderful that those objections seem small. Here is an example:
On a different day, perhaps, when the air wasn't hot as a crucible, when there was a little lick of breeze, I might have relented, but the kitchen was close, and all I could feel was my own sweat, welling up so fast, it threatened to choke me. I was sick of life, sick of the cicadas shrilling all through the night, sick of the twists of vines crawling over all the fences when they would only drop their leaves in a few weeks and die. I closed my eyes. “Go,” I seethed, and waited till I heard the back door close as softly as a sigh.
Steve Lindahl – author of Motherless Soul and White Horse Regressions
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