Pandora hasn't seen her older brother, Edison, a hip New York jazz musician, in four years. When she picks him up at an Iowa airport, he gives her the shock of her life: Edison has gained over 200 pounds and is unrecognizable. His visit is an intrusion into Pandora's home, which she shares with her fitness-freak husband, Fletcher, and her two adopted children. National Book Award finalist and New York Times best-selling novelist Shriver (So Much for That; We Need To Talk About Kevin) is known for her unstinting scrutiny of timely topics. Now she confronts the social but also painfully private issue of obesity through sibling relationships and marriage. However, the novel is essentially about fat-the nature of our relationship to food, why we overeat, and whether crash diets really work. As Fletcher becomes incensed with his brother-in-law's appalling eating habits, slovenly appearance, and careless behavior, he gives Pandora an ultimatum: it's him or me. VERDICT Brilliantly imagined, beautifully written, and superbly entertaining, Shriver's novel confronts readers with the decisive question: can we save our loved ones from themselves? A must-read for Shriver fans, this novel will win over new readers as well. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 12/9/12.]-Lisa Block, Atlanta (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

PANDORA HALFDANARSON is a dedicated settler: she has settled for stepmotherhood; for marriage to an ascetic perfectionist; for an unlikely career as the owner of a small business, Baby Monotonous. She has settled in New Holland, Iowa, where she makes commissioned talking dolls, each primed with a list of remarks ("I don't have that many credit cards"; "I owe it to myself to have a few nice things") guaranteed to razz a customer's loved one. Pandora is a middle-aged middle child, having grown up in the shadow of her jazz pianist brother, Edison. When she learns that Edison is in trouble, she offers him her guest room. Only when she picks him up at the Cedar Rapids airport does she understand how far he has fallen: there she is greeted by "the creature that had swallowed Edison." Her once-dashing brother, her childhood hero, has become unrecognizably fat. At close to 400 pounds, he heaves from place to place. The only chair big enough for him is a broken-down recliner, which the family must maneuver to the dining table and around which they must choreograph their steps. He dwarfs their house, consumes mass quantities of food, monopolizes conversations and breaks his brother-in-law's delicate handcrafted furniture. When his two-month visit is up, Pandora, her loyalties torn between Edison and her furious, put-upon husband, must decide whether to let him go off and kill himself with food or keep him close, rescuing him at the cost of her marriage. She chooses her big brother. Pandora rents an apartment and agrees to remain by Edison's side for the next 12 months, so long as he stays on a draconian program of diet and exercise. She even diets with him, partly for his morale and partly because she has a few pounds of her own to lose. There follows a siege of magical shrinking: after a brutal introduction to their daily allowance of 150-calorie protein drinks (Edison sobs with hunger), their bodies stop demanding more food and commence devouring themselves. Like bears, Pandora and Edison dance around their apartment, celebrating their "ketosis party." Time passes, pounds melt away and the siblings reconnect, sorting out the truth about their family, about their own ambitions and sorrows. Dieting readers will follow the siblings' weight-loss odyssey with great skepticism and greater hope. While the novel was inspired, in part, by Shriver's own brother's struggle with obesity, the topic could hardly be more universal: one in three Americans are statistically obese, and most people, fat or thin, worry about their weight. Shriver understands that hunger is one thing for those who are literally starving and a very different thing for the rest of us. No matter how much we have, we're never content. Unlike less conspicuous habits of consumption, obesity makes our disappointment in life visible. "Big Brother" is about "the baffling lassitude of affluence" - the hard truth that "however gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse." Pandora is a masterly creation, a woman who craves obscurity, hates to be admired and is startled when reminded that she's physically recognizable. Her body is merely an avatar, not her real, elemental self. She observes from the shadows, and she doesn't miss anything. Yet Edison, while gifted with pages of dialogue and proportioned like a behemoth, isn't quite three-dimensional. We can picture him all too clearly, but while we see that he's a creature of towering need, his character remains hidden. But then, aren't we all hidden from one another, no matter how close we yearn to be? This is Pandora's story, and she settles for nothing less than the truth: "We are meant to be hungry." Jincy Willett's latest novel, "Amy Falls Down," will be published in July.

Shriver continues her fictional inquiry into the timely topic of obesity, launched in the The New Republic (2012), with a novel about how weight problems can alter the dynamics of a family in devastating ways. Pandora is a successful entrepreneur living in Iowa with her uptight husband, Fletcher. Pandora's brother, Edison, is a once-popular jazz pianist in New York who can no longer pay his rent. Against Fletcher's wishes, Pandora sends Edison a plane ticket to Iowa; when he arrives, she almost doesn't recognize him owing to the hundreds more pounds he carries than when she last saw him. Edison's slovenly habits disgust Fletcher, a nutritional Nazi, so when Pandora commits to helping Edison lose all those pounds, the siblings move to an apartment nearby. Shriver creates suspense by adroitly involving the reader in Pandora's effort to help her brother, and as in previous novels, she injects an unexpected twist at the end, which some readers may find annoying rather than clever. Nevertheless, Shriver brilliantly explores the strength of sibling bonds versus the often more fragile ties of marriage.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist

Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin) returns to the family in this intelligent meditation on food, guilt, and the real (and imagined) debts we owe the ones we love. Ex-caterer Pandora has made it big with a custom doll company that creates personal likenesses with pull-string, sometimes crude, catch phrases. The dolls speak to the condition of these characters-all trapped in destructive relationships with food (and each other): Pandora cooks to show love, to the delight of her compulsively fit husband Fletcher, whose refusal to eat diary or vary from his biking routine are the outward manifestation of his remove. Pandora's brother Edison eats to ease the pain of a stalled music career and broken marriage. And both live somewhat uncomfortably in the shadow of their father's TV fame. In Big Brother, nothing reveals character more scathingly than food. Early in the book, the nearly 400-pound Edison arrives-waddling through an Iowa airport with a "ground eating galumph"-a man transformed in the four years since his sister last saw him. He brings the novel energy as well as an occasionally unpalatable maudlin drama. But Pandora will risk everything, including her own health, to save him. If this devotion and Pandora's increasing success with Edison's diet plan sometimes seem chirpily false, a late reveal provides devastating justification. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A woman is at a loss to control her morbidly obese brother in the latest feat of unflinching social observation from Shriver (The New Republic, 2012, etc.). Pandora, the narrator of this smartly turned novel, is a happily settled 40-something living in a just-so Iowa home with her husband and two stepchildren and running a successful business manufacturing custom dolls that parrot the recipient's pet phrases. Her brother, Edison, is a New York jazz pianist who's hit the skids, and when he calls hoping to visit for a while, she's happy to assist. But she's aghast to discover he's ballooned from a trim 163 to nearly 400 pounds. Edison can be a pretentious blowhard to start with, and his weight makes him an even more exasperating houseguest, clearing out the pantry, breaking furniture and driving a wedge in Pandora's marriage. So Pandora concocts a scheme: She'll move out to live with Edison while monitoring his crash diet of protein-powder drinks. The book is largely about weight and America's obesity epidemic; Shriver writes thoughtfully about our diets and how our struggle to find an identity tends to lead us toward the fridge, and she describes our fleshy flaws with a candor that marks much of her fiction. But the book truly shines as a study of family relationships. As Pandora spends a year as Edison's cheerleader, drill sergeant and caregiver, Shriver reveals the complex push and pull between siblings and has some wise and troubling things to say about guilt, responsibility and how what can seem like tough love is actually overindulgence. The story's arc flirts with a cheeriness that's unusual for her, but a twist ending reassures us this is indeed a Shriver novel and that our certitude is just another human foible. A masterful, page-turning study of complex relationships among our bodies, our minds and our families.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.