Big Brother: Brilliant family fiction from the award-winning author of We Need To Talk About Kevin

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But yeah, supposedly, this guy will eat powdered sugar straight from the bag, but in the process just gets powdered sugar everywhere because of course he's a slob; takes a first serving at a first meal that is more than half of a casserole so that others are left hungry because of course he's hungry, stupid, and selfish; insists on making the rest of the skinny family inordinate amounts of terribly unhealthy food because he's inconsiderate, pushy, and stupid; etc. Fletcher ‘is’ successful at being obsessively fit—he rides his bike hours a day and wouldn’t consider eating white flour.

But all too often, I sensed authorial intrusion: it was as if I were being educated as to what to think about this issue. I also had difficulty believing she and her husband - who is pretty much a total jerk - were ever happy. Enter Pandora's washed-up, jazz pianist brother, Edison Appaloosa, an oversized presence even before he gained hundreds of pounds.

The siblings’ love versus the married-couple’s love, for example, was an interesting and gutsy exploration. Her decision—choosing between her birth family and her created family—needed, in my opinion, needed a bit more fleshing out.

In a way, none of us can prevent this, as this is a natural response, almost in shock when we see someone of this size, but we can try to tell ourselves that we have no right to think of someone this way, for we have no idea the exact reason that they became this way. What Shriver characters also tend to have in common is a clear view of both the world and themselves. As someone who works a day job that is at the forefront of the obesity revolution (as a manager of a health club run by former Biggest Loser contestants), I've seen so many of the moments in the book first hand and realize the complexity of what fighting obesity entails. Pandora, the 40-year-old stepmother of two teenagers, runs an "offbeat" novelty doll business that has gone "viral" and made her rich and a bit famous.I did, however, chuckle at her use of the phrase "But, to my horror," because I could imagine almost any Shriver character using that phrase, despite their differences.

It doesn't sound good now that I'm typing it, but I tend to favor books with complex or unexpected protagonists.seat belts that won't stretch far enough to lock in; the difficulty in finding clothes that fit; problems with maintaining good personal hygiene. It's like one of my students writing, thinking that the more SAT words cramped into a sentence the better.

We do not commonly use "I'd" as a contraction for "I had" in a sentence like this: I'd no idea he was so unhappy. It's a lot to swallow, and I was initially as skeptical as I am about fad diets — but the book grows on you. The plot is that she is going to leave her two teenage children and her husband, get an apartment nearby, live with her brother for a year to help him lose his weight. So she has to decide between her husband and her brother, which is essentially what the book is about--that choice and the repercussions thereof. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis ‘Death pursued through the medium of fried food’ …a diner in Atlantic City.

Her washed-up TV star of a father has given her an intense need to demonstrate her humility as he never had, and her older brother Edison has fallen upon some hard times so he comes to stay with Pandora’s family for a few months in Iowa to get back on his feet. In time, this may become my most favorite Shriver novel; she is not assailing me with politic vitriol nor disturbing me with harrowing parenting stories. And there's the all-too-recognisable preposterousness of a man like Fletcher, with his "beige" salads and the self-righteous "pock-pock" as he perpetually flosses his teeth. Shriver’s protagonist- and younger sister to ‘Big Brother’, *Edison*, is named *Pandora* ( is that not a cool name? 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.