Life Among Giants (Roorbach) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Life Among Giants is a larger-than-life production. Yet all of its wild characters feel genuine, their aches and flaws and desires wholly organic; and the plot they’re tangled in moves forward at a breakneck pace. It’s a dizzy romp. There’s murder and intrigue and sex and terror, and Roorbach is generous with it all.
Haley Tanner - New York Times Book Review


Life Among Giants, is a bighearted, big-boned story about a young man's entanglement with celebrities. Without a hint of satire, it offers a savvy reflection on America's conflicted relationship to fame: beguiled one minute, horrified the next; desperate to touch the Beautiful People, but just as eager to rebuke them…Roorbach is a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Consistently surprising and truly entertaining...Part thriller, part family drama, Life Among Giants is deliciously strange and deeply affecting.
Boston Globe


What lingers after finishing Life Among Giants is the beauty of Roorbach’s appreciation of his characters’ exceptional physical abilities, as they play football, cook, make love and dance.
Dallas Morning News


Besides being a compelling mystery, the kind to keep one reading well after bedtime, and a novel that almost insists on being immediately reread, Life Among Giants is a reminder of the ways we all shape our lives into stories, and the ways those stories, in turn, shape us.
Columbus Dispatch


An exploration of lives touched by greatness and tragedy in equal measure, Roorbach’s latest novel traces towering Princeton graduate and NFL player-cum-restaurateur David “Lizard” Hochmeyer in his attempt to unravel the tangled conspiracy behind his parents’ murder in 1970. When his parents are killed in front of him at a restaurant, David believes the culprits are connected to his neighbor, the elegant ballerina Sylphide, whose rock star husband also died under mysterious circumstances.... Roorbach (Big Bend) has written a mystery free of contemporary cynicism and recalling the glitter and allure of a kind of stardom that has also, in its way, been collateral damage to a greedy financial machine.
Publishers Weekly


This ambitious, energetic novel from Roorbach (Big Bend) has something for everyone—steamy sex, rock stars, ballet stars, professional football, a dysfunctional family, an unsolved murder, and a complicated revenge plot.... Verdict: This big, sprawling novel has so much going on that it's easy to lose track of the murder mystery at its heart. It would pack more of a punch if it had a sharper focus. —Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA
Library Journal


This is one of those novels you read because you care about what happens to the people and the connections between them as those connections grow, fray, and snap. By turns surreal and gritty, the book is written with the same muscular grace possessed by the dancers and athletes who are its main characters,
Booklist


With memories of people tangled "in a hopeless knot," David "Lizard" Hochmeyer attempts to unravel the Gordian in Roorbach's latest novel. The people include his assassinated parents; Emily, his African-American-Korean first love; and Sylphide, prima ballerina and widow...a mere sampling of the exotic, eye-catching cast, the best thing about this book.... Great setup, sparkling characters, but one-third into the book readers will hunger for less setup and characterization and want the story to get moving. It does, in complex fashion.... The rich-and-famous lifestyle is nicely rendered, too. A narrative threaded through with corruption and an appreciable number of love stories.
Kirkus Reviews