Jean Clocker is conceived by her mother Wisteria only as a means to entrap a damaged First World War veteran into marriage. Having achieved wedlock but failed in her plan to rid herself of the now-redundant snare, Wisteria visits maternal tyranny on Jean with enthusiasm and diabolical skill. Born of rage and envy, into a body as epic as the life she will live, Jean spends her early years avoiding her mother's blows and striving to make herself just a little less extraordinary. She is finally released from servitude in the opening days of the Second World War. Orphaned, she thrives in wartime, all the while fearing the return of normality and its accompanying and impossible condition of conformity. It is Denny, a tiny and impossibly charistmatic GI with a reverence for size, who facilitates her second liberation, as he takes her across the ocean as his bride. But in California, he disappears without warning, and Jean is required once more to negotiate the world on her own.

I was disappointed in this which is a shame as I'd hoped I'd like it. I've wanted to read it for ages, since hearing about it on a book programme when it was first published - thought it sounded intriguing.

It started off well enough & I thought it was going to be an interesting read as the humour had a hint of Kate Atkinson about it & that, IMHO, can only be a good thing. Sadly that didn't last. I didn't engage with Jean, hated Wisteria & found the storyline rather mundane given that it had so much potential.

To be honest I haven't much else to say about it. At times Jean's size seemed irrelevant, & any way how big was she actually supposed to be? Most of the time to me she just seemed to be a big girl (6 ft maybe?) but by the time she became a "film star" she could have been eight foot tall. Maybe I missed something along the way but quite frankly I don't care...just glad to have finished it.

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