Then come two stark moments of truth: first, Edison breaks Fletcher's most precious (albeit unusable) piece of furniture, a sin for which the latter cannot muster forgiveness.

Like your cold Aunt Millie who clucks her tongue about the shame of your beautiful face hidden under that fat, this book holds out love for Edison until he begins to lose weight.As for the larger question of whether Pandora would allow her brother to swallow her life whole, I can assure you, without giving away too much, that Shriver manages to redeem this cockamamie scenario in the end.

The only thing I remember hearing about this book - being completely honest here - is that is was a ‘dud’.

When Emerson travels from New York to Iowa, he interrupts the rhythm of Pandora’s carefully crafted life: she is the founder of a high-profile niche business, the wife of a self-employed one-of-a-kind cabinetmaker and the stepmom of two teenagers. The narrator, 40-year-old Pandora Halfdanarson, threw over an arduous catering business after the freakish success of her novelty custom Baby Monotonous dolls, programmed to spout a menu of the recipients' oft-repeated platitudes.

The story is narrated by Pandora - a forty-something woman who lives with her husband Fletcher and her two teenage step-children. If you want to learn about how you can create a calm and relaxing environment during childbirth, we’ve compiled a list of the best hypnobirthing books, courses, apps and podcasts, as recommended by mums. The only reason it's NOT a 5, is that I had difficulty with the premise of the plot, which actually resolves itself in the last 15 pages. It is not often you find a male character imbibed with such handicap, such loss in his life as you find here. Therefore, I also appreciated, yet not quite entirely, once I allowed myself to think outside the box, that Pandora actually never did this.Shriver has her anti-hero consuming considerably more calories in coffee creamer per day than would be needed to support the weight she has him at, plus gorging on everything else.