The Giant’s House audiobook

This is still one of my top 5 favorite books of all time. Elizabeth McCracken's style of writing is really beautiful. She has an unapologetic way of presenting a person's deepest innermost flaws, while simultaneously giving you every opportunity to fall in love with them. I fell in love with the main characters in this book, over and over again. I gave this book to a friend and bought myself another copy, which I've referred repeatedly. I don't know that I plan to read it again, but I can't imagine my life without this book living on my shelf.

All it took was someone else to mention this book for me to have to take it from my shelf to re-read. I tend to buy books when I know they are 5 star as GoodReads would have it. Librarian who doesn't like people, a description of someone's buttocks as wide as an open dictionary. My opinion of Elizabeth McCracken's genius here is well-known to all my non-virtual friends. James and Peggy are both remarkable characters. I could continue but why waste time reading this when you could be having your heart broken, very slowly, by Elizabeth McCracken?

The premise of the novel The Giant’s House reads like it was ripped from the headlines of a supermarket tabloid: LIBRARIAN WEDS GIANT! It’s No TALL TALE! See page 13 for the Big Shocking Details!While it’s true that Elizabeth McCracken’s novel is built around sensationalism and while it’s also true that the spinster librarian weds the world’s tallest man, it’s also true that this is one of the oddest, sweetest romances you’ll ever read.Nominated for the National Book Award in 1996, The Giant’s House is the story of Peggy Cort, a lonely librarian in a small Cape Cod town in the 1950s. One day, James Carlson Sweatt, the world’s tallest boy (six-foot-two when he was eleven years old), walks into her library and asks for help finding a book. Here’s how McCracken describes their first meeting:"He first came into my library in the fall of 1950, when he was eleven. Some teacher from the elementary school brought them all trooping in; I was behind the desk, putting a cart of fiction in order. I thought at first he was a second teacher, he was so much taller than the rest, tall even for a grown man. Then I noticed the chinos and white bucks and saw that this was the over-tall boy I’d heard about."From that moment on, neither of their lives will be the same. Over the years, Peggy develops a close friendship with James—a friendship that sprouts into a romance, then blossoms into, yes, the world’s strangest marriage. Not since Tom Thumb wed his midget bride has there ever been such a tabloid-ready romance as this one.Peggy helps James pick out size-30 shoes and supervises the construction of his built-to-fit cottage in his mother’s back yard. He, on the other hand, breathes life into her dull spinsterhood. He’s sweet and honest; he’s tender with his compliments; he writes her love notes:Love Poem for a LibrarianAlthough her love for me is infinitesimal,Her eyes are as Dewey as any old decimal.Who could resist someone who wrote verse like that (no matter how much his head scraped the ceiling)? James is indeed a very endearing character and is just the right tonic for Peggy’s bitter depression. Gradually, we come to see that this is a universal love story, a fable for our own romantically-troubled times. What begins as a romance worthy of P.T. Barnum soon becomes something that can apply to any number of relationships in society. It’s a fairy tale for oddballs, yes; but it also applies to us "ordinary" folks, too.It’s not a perfect novel by any means. McCracken’s style is at times too heavy on the metaphor and there’s an unexpectedly wrenching sadness, especially in the closing pages. But there is also some absolutely stunning writing at work on these pages. I especially like this early description:"Everyone knew him as The Giant. Well, what else could you call him? Brilliant, maybe, and handsome and talented, but doomed to be mostly enormous. A painter, an amateur magician, a compulsive letter-writer, James Carlson Sweatt spent his life sitting down, hunching over. Hunching partly because that’s the way he grew, like a flower; partly to make him seem smaller to the others."In fact, leafing back through the pages, I found so many quotable passages that it was hard to pick just one. This is writing that is so lovely, so majestically composed that, just like its main character, it looms large on the page and in your memory long after you’ve closed the last page.

“But you cannot fly away from people who have flown away from you; you cannot fly into your own arms...Once you have been left you are always left; you cannot leave your leaving.”

A beautifully imagined and totally unconventional tale of love in a small-town Cape Cod setting wherein a young man meets the town librarian. The young man James grows to be the tallest man ever, but his needs are faithfully tended to by the librarian. Bizarre, you may ask? Yes, perhaps a bit.I do love libraries and have just visited the Provincetown Library as well as the Chatham Library on Cape Cod, so this may have helped me accept this story in a more open way.

This is a romance between a young librarian and a giant 14 years her junior. It is a character-driven story, but also well plotted and riveting. McCracken is, at least in this book, a gifted storyteller. There are so many places that her creativity almost startles you - a gem of insight into a character or relationship, a plot element that is unexpected but just the right thing. Its wry humor contrasts with the tragedies of the librarian's discomfort with herself and the effect of the genetic disorder on the giant's life. It is a bittersweet book, with both tragedy and joy. It doesn't try for a happy ending, but rather for one with its own compensations.

I hadn’t read this in years and really loved it.

This was by first book in my subscription to the Chocolate and Book Box, I have chosen the category "Hidden Gem" that is exactly how I would describe this book.The story is a little out of the ordinary: the main character Peggy is a librarian and she retells her own life and relationship with a young man that was a giant. Peggy calls her story a "love story", it isn't in the traditionnal way, but love does exist between Peggy and James though it is so much more than a meet, fall in love, marry path. I've seen some people that reviewed this title disturbed by the fact that Peggy meets James when he is 11 years old and had a 13 years difference with him, that didn't bother me... I've seen that in real life and nothing romantic happens before James is an adult (as people I have known were) and in a village knowing people all your life is not so rare.I'm very glad that my subscription chose this book first, I had put this on by TBR years ago and just forgot about it... and I have to say I can't wait for next month to see what they will send me!