It's 21st century Iowa, and Pandora, in her 40s, running a profitable unique business, married to perfectionist, careful eater and fitness fanatic Fletcher, with his modern art furniture business not doing lickety-spit; and Pandora is step mum to his two kids.

Unfortunately, she seems to have bitten off more than she could chew, what with a marriage, a health problem that is also a social issue, a difficult sibling relationship, and a semi-troubled stepkid.She doesn't like the publicity, but loves her "big, lobotomised" house in Iowa, her craftsman husband and his two teenage children.

With honesty, precision and humour, she conveys all the boredom and exhilaration of weight loss, along with its tendency to threaten the people around you. Harhar sigh*) I so wanted to root for Edison to escape this abusive partner of a book and strike out into a world that could have dealt with his depression in a supportive way. They have grown up in the limelight of their father, Travis Appaloosa's successful television series and drawn even closer after their mother dies when Pandora is 13.But she would have felt a lot of sadness and regret about the situation, so the fantasy was like a tribute to him and a wish that things could have been different.

There's Shriver's intensely drawn portrait of a modern family: a step-relationship evoked with wonderfully matter-of-fact tenderness and unsentimental realism. Well, what ensues is an admittedly interesting and insightful examination (though if it could have been a less direct one this would have been a much better book) of how both gaining and losing weight cuts both ways, and how we associate food with oh so many things.I felt that the introspection on our fetishism over size/weight/food was sufficient to ignore the other. 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. The novel is a play on these terms: on how important it is to be gifted (or not), all-giving (or not). Pandora, a middle aged woman, has a husband Fletcher, a stepson Tanner (17 years old) and a stepdaughter Cody (13 years old). At first I felt cheated just like you OP, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed right.

It opens with a short treatise on the meaning of eating: "I have to wonder whether any of the true highlights of my fortysome years have had to do with food. Therefore, I also appreciated, yet not quite entirely, once I allowed myself to think outside the box, that Pandora actually never did this. The main character, while admitting that she herself has an extra thirty pounds to lose, doesn't hold back on the criticism of her fellow Americans, whom she accuses of forgetting how to eat and gorging themselves while blissfully ignorant of their expanding middles, but the worst treatment is reserved for Edison, the morbidly obese character, who is little more than a caricature of every cruel stereotype of an obese person (lazy and busy stuffing their face whatever unhealthy food is in reach. The tension increased between Pandora and Fletcher, who became tired of this houseguest who broke his delicate handcrafted furniture and who did not appear to want to make any changes in his life. Favorite passage: "If I held few opinions, I did cling to a handful--like the view that facts are not the same as beliefs, and that most people get them confused.I don’t know about you, but in high school, I was taught that to end a book with ‘it was all just a dream’ was literary suicide.