the little giant of aberdeen county by tiffany baker

The characters in this book were chock full of emotion yet had such a hard time sharing their thoughts. I read and listened to the audio of this book and both were delightful but I very much enjoyed that Shapiro narrated this one herself. Her writing simply wraps itself around you like a cozy blanket. Shapiro creates a powerful and often poetic story using sparse but meaningful language. Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro is her first work of fiction in fifteen years and she’s back with an utterly successful book about connection, silence, marriage family, guilt and love. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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 feminine perfection.

When Truly Plaice’s mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how record breakingly huge the baby boy would ultimately be.

The little giant of aberdeen county by tiffany baker