Life Among Giants is an extravagantly imagined novel about David "Lizard" Hochmeyer, a sweet high school quarterback from suburban Connecticut who loses his parents in a double murder and falls under the sway of the famous ballerina next door. As Lizard goes on to college and then the NFL, he and his older sister, Kate, struggle separately to solve the mystery of their parents' demise. Lizard relates their story in retrospect, and by letting the revelations unfold over the decades, Roorbach makes the novel a leisurely mystery as well as a bildungsroman. It's also a playful anthropological portrait of American preoccupations in the late 20th century: country club aspirations, 9-to-5 chicanery, Ivy League bumptiousness, the use of touchy-feely psychology in pro sports, the deification of prima ballerinas and the sloppy hedonism of 1960s rock stars.
Roorbach successfully creates a dozen unusual characters, including Lizard, English rock star Dabney Stryker-Stewart and Sylphide, his Norwegian ballerina-wife. With flashes of fantasy and obsession, and enormous heart, Life Among Giants enchants. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts