The Giant's House: A Romance (Paperback)

This tale documents the world's first posthumous marriage between the world's largest man, eight foot seven inches, four hundred and fifteen pounds at death, and the oddest librarian. Set in 1950's Cape Cod, this book immediate hooks with the opening lines: "I do not love mankind. People think they're interesting. That's their first mistake".

This book is so peculiar, it easily takes flight. It would seem that selecting a topic so strange would be a hopeless endeavor. However, add humanity and the hope in one's ability to find a place and love in the world; Add Ms. McCracken's ability to write AND to tell a tale, and you have an intriguing romance.

The tale clips along at a rapid pace, through Peggy, the librarian's on-going internal dialogue. Peggy conducts a life teeming with the library sciences, interaction with her patrons and small town people and a blossoming family life with the various members of James' family. She possesses a profound ineptitude for love. Then, she falls in love with James, a younger but much bigger man.

Besides a great size difference, there is the great age difference between Peggy and James, delicately and obtusely described by Peggy " There's a joke about that. A forty-year-old man (it's always a man) falls in love with a ten-year-old girl. He's four times her age. He waits five years; now he's forty-five and she's fifteen and he's ony three times her age. Fifteen years later he's sixty, only double her age. How long until she catches up completely? I love that joke."

This is mixed in with very oddly timed character appearances and disappearances, such as the suicide from overdose of James' mother, the appearance of James' father after James dies, and a one night stand in which Peggy becomes pregnant. The time frames are vague, with mention of various dates, primarily in relationship to the age of the characters throughout the book. However the characters are clear and quirky, and carry the plot weaknesses and time lapses forward.

You, the reader, get to do the math.

Other notable characters include another librarian, Astoria Peck. She "handled most of the library's technical processes-repairing books or sending them out to a bindery, if they could be saved at all; cataloguing; billing. Like me, she was a librarian (that is, she had a master's in library science) and had for many years worked at the elementary school. Once she hit forty, she said, she got tired of the smell of children

'They smell like bad cookies, " she told me. "Go ahead, get a good whiff.'"

Jame's aunt is another interesting figure, not that much older than Peggy: "His aunt answered for him from across the room, closing the door behind her. "he's been fine, " she said. Her voice gave me a start, but a weird pleasure, too-it was a deep sticky voice, the kind a woman generally gets through sin of some sort".

The Giant's House is a romance of a strange, bittersweet nature. This painful tale of love lost/love found; a heartache of a tale told by a librarian of all people.

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