Describe the issues and solutions in The Giant’s House.

Elizabeth McCraken's book The Giant's House is appropriately subtitled, "A Romance." This is because the book, at its core, is simply an old fashioned romance. A small-town librarian, Peggy Cort, falls in love with an unusual person, a teenager who cannot stop growing (the "giant" of the title).

The book is about many things; one of the most important is the inconsistency of love. Peggy grapples with this issue throughout the whole story. She frequently...

Elizabeth McCraken's book The Giant's House is appropriately subtitled, "A Romance." This is because the book, at its core, is simply an old fashioned romance. A small-town librarian, Peggy Cort, falls in love with an unusual person, a teenager who cannot stop growing (the "giant" of the title).

The book is about many things; one of the most important is the inconsistency of love. Peggy grapples with this issue throughout the whole story. She frequently compares love and marriage to her library, whose system is fraught with overdue books and cracks in how it is supposed to work. Love and marriage, she thinks, must be the same way. 

"I had never wanted to be one of those girls in love with boys who would not have me," Peggy says. "Unrequited love--plain desperate aboveboard boy-chasing--turned you into a salesperson, and what you were selling was something he didn't want, couldn't use, would never miss. Unrequited love was deciding to be useless, and I could never abide uselessness."

But when Peggy meets James, the 11-year old giant, she finds herself falling in love with him. Her tune begins to change. She sees James differently than the small town around her. The town simply sees him as an entertaining freak; she sees a boy more curious than anyone she has ever known. 

Peggy and James get to know each other. They spend countless hours together as Peggy tries and tries to provide for James' welfare. When he becomes too big for normal furniture, she gathers money to build him a giant-sized house behind her own. As he comes of age, and she realizes she is in love with him, she reflects on the nature of love:

"This is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. I don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, I know me too. I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?"

So, one of the core issues of the story is love, its nature and its reliability. The solution is that Peggy chooses to love James, despite that fact that his illness makes him keep growing and keep getting sicker. At the end of the novel, James dies and Peggy's life is forever changed because of him.