MADreads

Not the eighth wonder of the world, but…

June 29th, 2009 Kylee

Let me make this clear right off the bat: Truly Plaice isn’t really a giant.  At least, she’s isn’t what you’d find at the top of a beanstalk.  She’s more an Andre the Giant type; hence the “little” before “giant” in the title of Tiffany Baker’s debut novel The Little Giant of Aberdeen County.  That said, it took me about half of the book to accept that Truly wasn’t going to be crushing towns beneath her feet or even yelling “fee, fi, fo, fum,” but once I got over my disappointment, I really started to enjoy this book.

Truly Plaice is truly out of place (sorry, I couldn’t resist) in Aberdeen County during the 1950s.  There’s something strange about her from the start - when her mother’s stomach looks more like she’s carrying triplets than a single baby, everyone starts to wonder what kind of child is growing in there.  Tragically, Truly’s mother dies in childbirth, leaving her father to raise her and her lovely older sister Serena Jane.  Truly grows faster than a normal child, quickly outgrowing her sister’s old clothes until her father’s old shirts are about all she can wear.  Her size and awkwardness are made even more obvious in comparison with Serena Jane, whose delicate, doll-like features make her one of the prettiest girls in town.

A series of unfortunate circumstances leads Truly to the home of the Dyersons, a poor family known locally for their consistent bad luck, and Serena Jane to a hasty marriage to Bob-Bob Martin, son of the town doctor.  When Serena Jane leaves her family, Truly must pick up the pieces, and in the process, finally accept her own larger-than-life identity.  Like its heroine, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County is a little giant of a novel.  At 341 pages, it’s not overly wordy, or even too heavy to carry around in a large-ish purse or briefcase, yet it manages to pack quite a number of years between its covers.  The ambitious story the author successfully folds into these pages follows Truly’s upbringing from childhood to her later life, and in between, elegantly reveals the changes in Aberdeen County itself through the decades.  While barely spanning two generations, the novel captures the feeling of a sprawling epic with a refreshing clarity and conciseness, while subplots involving potential witchcraft and the Vietnam War also add to the intrigue.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction