But the biggest sin to me is the book's ending, which pretty much made everything you read up to that point meaningless. Sure, each of the family members had talked to each other and even argued about Edison; but the conversation about Edison's size and his problems were never discussed with Edison himself. But for me, the story just wasn't "big" enough to really deal with them or interesting enough to hold my attention. And Pandora – the emotional core of this novel is her good-hearted sense of responsibility to those she loves – decides to stage the biggest and most dramatic intervention possible. And this was all in addition to our confectioner's sugar, which Edison was spooning straight from the box.

Yet on pristine stretches the countryside expressed the timeless groundedness and solidity that had captivated me as a child . Here’s what’s awesome about the novel: with a premise like that, there were only a few outcomes to the tale that I could readily envisage. Shriver is great at analyzing human behavior and looking at motives and actions we might want to ignore. I’d recently read another very opinionated article from her regarding political correctness, and seeing the blurb for this book made me feel like it could only go south.I would not recommend this book to anyone who knows someone who has struggled or is struggling with weight because it is unhelpful, patronizing, and offensive. Shriver decided to go the route of Reconstructing Amelia in imposing highly unlikely attributes on a subject she probably knows little about.

The book opens with Pandora’s older brother, Edison, and his impending and prolonged stay at her Iowa home. Overall, if you can get past the verbiage to the heart of the story, I think you'll enjoy this book. You can absolutely imagine and believe in the slim, dashingly charismatic former-Edison lurking within that lumbering frame. It opens with a short treatise on the meaning of eating: "I have to wonder whether any of the true highlights of my fortysome years have had to do with food. In an interview, which is included in the end of the novel, she says that when she decided to go with "option d", it changed how she wrote the book because she then wrote Part II as especially unbelievable.It is not often you find a male character imbibed with such handicap, such loss in his life as you find here. this is no more spoiler than what appears on the back cover) Main character (Pandora) picks up her brother (Edison) from the airport after not having seen him for several years and doesn't even recognize him at first because he's gained so much weight.