BOOKFINDS

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

I know that I am going to come off as the little cheerleader for debut author, Tiffany Baker, but I just love when authentic stories come out of major publishing houses. Baker’s book THE LITTLE GIANT OF ABERDEEN COUNTY, may just be one of those books. I haven’t read the book yet and am purely basing my opinions on the description of the novel and the phenomenal early reader reviews she has received from amazing authors like Joshilyn Jackson and Sara Gruen. The book was pitched as Wally Lamb meets Elizabeth McCracken, about a girl who grows physically and emotionally beyond her small town’s wildest expectations, and was sold to Caryn Karmatz Rudy at Warner, in a significant deal, in a pre-empt, by Daniel Lazar at Writers House.
Here is the description of THE LITTLE GIANT OF ABERDEEN COUNTY.

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.

Here is some of the early praise:

A beautiful, startling and wholly original novel, LGOAC is infused with magic, lush language, and surprises on every page. Tiffany Baker has given us a flawed, prickly, enchanting heroine in Truly–part Cinderella, part Witch, part Behemoth. In ther timeless story of small town life, the boundary between reality and fairy tale does not exist, and happy endings are possible but hard-won. This book is a treasure.

—Stephanie Kallos, author of BROKEN FOR YOU

TLGOAC read so fresh and unfolded in such surprising ways that I was captivated from start to finish. It’s a bracing, bright, masterful debut, and Tiffany Baker is a writer to watch.

—Joshilyn Jackson, author of THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING.

“THE LITTLE GIANT OF ABERDEEN COUNTY grabs you from its astonishing beginning to its riveting conclusion. Its charms are multitude– a wholly unique love story, a devastating friendship, a bewitching multi-generational history, all brought to an apex in the larger-than-life personage of Truly, a heroine simultaneously infused with a quiet and dignified grace and peculiar sense of purpose. This dark-yet-rolicking debut is a must-read.”

–Sara Gruen, author of WATER FOR ELEPHANTS