The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

Paperback, 368 pages

Published Jan. 25, 2010 by Grand Central Publishing.

ISBN:: 978-0-446-19422-8

When Truly Plaice's mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how recordbreakingly huge the baby boy would ultimately be. The girl who proved to be Truly paid the price of her enormity; her father blamed her for her mother's death in childbirth, and was totally ill equipped to raise either this giant child or her polar opposite sister Serena Jane, the epitome of femine perfection. When he, too, relinquished his increasingly tenuous grip on life, Truly and Serena Jane are separated--Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town on the farm of the town sadsack, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation at the hands of her peers.Serena Jane's beauty proves to be her greatest blessing and her biggest curse, for it makes her the obsession of classmate Bob Bob Morgan, the …

When Truly Plaice's mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how recordbreakingly huge the baby boy would ultimately be. The girl who proved to be Truly paid the price of her enormity; her father blamed her for her mother's death in childbirth, and was totally ill equipped to raise either this giant child or her polar opposite sister Serena Jane, the epitome of femine perfection. When he, too, relinquished his increasingly tenuous grip on life, Truly and Serena Jane are separated--Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town on the farm of the town sadsack, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation at the hands of her peers.Serena Jane's beauty proves to be her greatest blessing and her biggest curse, for it makes her the obsession of classmate Bob Bob Morgan, the youngest in a line of Robert Morgans who have been doctors in Aberdeen for generations. Though they have long been the pillars of the community, the earliest Robert Morgan married the town witch, Tabitha Dyerson, and the location of her fabled shadow book--containing mysterious secrets for healing and darker powers--has been the subject of town gossip ever since. Bob Bob Morgan, one of Truly's biggest tormentors, does the unthinkable to claim the prize of Serena Jane, and changes the destiny of all Aberdeen from there on. When Serena Jane flees town and a loveless marriage to Bob Bob, it is Truly who must become the woman of a house that she did not choose and mother to her eight-year-old nephew Bobbie. Truly's brother-in-law is relentless and brutal; he criticizes her physique and the limitations of her health as a result, and degrades her more than any one human could bear. It is only when Truly finds her calling--the ability to heal illness with herbs and naturopathic techniques--hidden within the folds of Robert Morgan's family quilt, that she begins to regain control over her life and herself. Unearthed family secrets, however, will lead to the kind of betrayal that eventually break the Morgan family apart forever, but Truly's reckoning with her own demons allows for both an uprooting of Aberdeen County, and the possibility of love in unexpected places.

6 editions

Dubi reviewed The little giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker

Review of 'The little giant of Aberdeen County' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book baffled me. I was three quarters of the way in before I managed to put into words what I thought the book was about, but then it turned into a tragedy, in the Greek sense, and I was no longer sure. Then came the epilogue, which felt tacked on and didn't really fit in either.

Truly is born a giant baby, and never really stops growing. But she is born in a little town that never changes - where for five generations the town doctor has been Robert Morgan, who always had a boy named Robert who would grow up to be the next Doctor Robert Morgan, and for generations there has been one family who lived in poverty in a farmhouse and were always down on their luck; where for God knows how many years the same woman was the teacher in the single-class schoolhouse (and I …

This book baffled me. I was three quarters of the way in before I managed to put into words what I thought the book was about, but then it turned into a tragedy, in the Greek sense, and I was no longer sure. Then came the epilogue, which felt tacked on and didn't really fit in either.

Truly is born a giant baby, and never really stops growing. But she is born in a little town that never changes - where for five generations the town doctor has been Robert Morgan, who always had a boy named Robert who would grow up to be the next Doctor Robert Morgan, and for generations there has been one family who lived in poverty in a farmhouse and were always down on their luck; where for God knows how many years the same woman was the teacher in the single-class schoolhouse (and I do mean God knows, because I'll be damned if I could follow the timeline for this book, it often made no sense to me at all). But then Truly is born, and things start to change, and the town fights against these changes because change is against everything they believe in.
So this is a book about tradition and change and how the two collide, and how this isn't always a good thing. But sometimes it is. But sometimes it really isn't. Without giving out too much of the plot, let us just say that this book gives a very mixed message about whether or not change is good, and the feeble attempts to give a happy ending in the epilogue is just... no.

Throughout most of the book I thought it would make a beautiful animated film - a manga, maybe. I still think it might. It has qualities that speak to the sensibilities of that genre. The book is certainly enjoyable, in a somber, depressing way, but I couldn't help but feel that part of the reason I couldn't figure out what the book was about was because the author didn't really know what she wanted to say all along, either.
Still, YMMV.