Life, and Death, and Giants Summary: An Amish Giant
Introduction
An eighteen-pound newborn arrives in the bed of a pickup truck at a veterinarian’s door in rural Wisconsin.
His mother, a shunned Amish teenager, dies minutes later. That infant, Gabriel Fisher, grows into a figure the small crossroads of Lakota cannot quite contain—a boy of extraordinary size, gentleness, and athletic gift.
Ron Rindo’s Life, and Death, and Giants follows Gabriel from that first impossible night through a life shaped by two worlds: the Old Order Amish who claim him and the outside world that wants to watch him.
The novel moves between the quiet of Waushara County and the roar of packed stadiums, tracing a family’s grief, faith, and buried secrets.
This novel suits readers of contemporary literary fiction who prefer character-driven storytelling over fast plotting. The narrative unfolds chronologically across twenty-three years, with four alternating first-person narrators and a strong sense of place.
Readers drawn to Amish and rural Americana settings will find detailed attention to plain dress, church discipline, Rumspringa, and farm life.
Those interested in sports fiction will find extended sequences covering T-ball, high school football, Big Ten play, and professional wrestling.
Readers who appreciate subtle magical realism—miraculous animal affinity, an impossible birth weight, an elemental death scene—will find those elements woven into an otherwise realistic story.
Those looking for a plot-driven thriller or a light read should note the book’s heavy material, which includes suicide, incest, terminal illness, and grief.
TL;DR: The Short Version
- What it is: A lyrical, character-driven literary novel with magical realist touches, set in rural central Wisconsin.
- The hook: A giant Amish boy is born under impossible circumstances and lives a life that touches everyone around him.
- The shape: Four parts, forty-three chapters, and a prologue, narrated by four alternating first-person voices.
- Central tension: Humble Amish values of humility and anonymity collide with a modern world that turns Gabriel into a spectacle.
- Core themes: Faith and suffering, hidden sin, forgiveness, the bond between people and animals, and the cost of being extraordinary.
- Emotional register: Elegiac and compassionate, with births, suicides, triumph, catastrophe, and a quiet ending.
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Book Snapshot
- Genre & Subgenre: Contemporary Literary Fiction / Magical Realism / Rural Americana
- Core Narrative Tropes: The gentle giant, small-town sanctuary, dark family secret, disgraced mentor seeking redemption, culture clash, tragic prodigy
- Tone & Atmosphere: Lyrical, melancholic, elegiac, and closely attuned to the seasons and landscape of central Wisconsin
- Primary Conflict: The self-denying, insular values of an Old Order Amish community versus the commercialized, media-driven outside world
- Pacing Style: Character-driven and episodic, chronological across twenty-three years
- Book Structure: Prologue, four parts, forty-three chapters; narrated in alternating first person by Hannah Fisher, Billy Walton, Dr. Thomas Kennedy, and Trey Beathard
- ISBN: 978-1250375339 (ISBN-10: 1250375339)
- Pages: 336
- Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, September 9, 2025
- Author Background: Ron Rindo is a Wisconsin-based novelist and professor emeritus of English whose fiction centers on rural Midwestern life.
Life, and Death, and Giants Summary: The Full Story
Warning: major spoilers ahead, including the ending.
Lakota, Wisconsin sits where County Roads JJ and Y meet near the Mecan River. The soil is sandy, the pines are jack pines, and the town runs on a tacit covenant of anonymity. People come there to be left alone, and Dr. Thomas Kennedy is one of them.
Kennedy is a former Milwaukee veterinarian who left the city after his wife Angela killed herself. One late September night, seventeen-year-old Jasper Fisher pulls into Kennedy’s yard with his dying mother in the truck bed.
Rachel Fisher is an unwed Amish woman who was shunned years earlier after becoming pregnant with Jasper at sixteen. She is in obstructed labor, and Kennedy has no equipment.
He delivers an eighteen-pound, twenty-seven-inch boy. Rachel names him Gabriel, nurses him once, and dies. Jasper takes the infant home to a farm left to Rachel by Charlotte Chesterfield, a pipe-smoking atheist neighbor.
Jasper feeds the baby raw goat’s milk from a stray Saanen doe. Gabriel grows at a rate no one can explain, and animals settle around him without fear.
When Gabriel is four, tavern owner Billy Walton spots his athletic gifts and puts him in T-ball. Gabriel hits balls over two hundred feet and shatters car windshields, so local parents push him into older leagues.
Jasper drowns under debt, property taxes, and alcohol, and under the cruelty of his grandfather Absalom Yoder, who calls him “RB,” for Rachel’s Bastard. When Gabriel is nine, Jasper hangs himself in the barn.
Gabriel and Doc Kennedy find the body. Afterward, Gabriel moves in with his Amish grandparents, Hannah and Josiah Fisher.
He takes to plain dress, Amish hymns, and milk goats, and he keeps helping Kennedy on Saturday veterinary calls. He is 6’6″ at ten, 6’11” at twelve, and past eight feet and nearly four hundred pounds by sixteen.
Josiah raises door headers to eight feet, lifts ceilings, and builds a longer bed. During Gabriel’s Rumspringa, disgraced former Texas football star Trey Beathard sees the boy tossing forty-pound hay bales thirty feet into the air.
Beathard, a recovering addict coaching at Waushara High School, talks Gabriel and his grandparents into football. Playing beside running back Chinua Ngobo and quarterback Julio Lopez, Gabriel becomes an unstoppable tackle and tailback.
The team wins a state championship, and national cameras arrive. Gabriel accepts a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he falls in love with Isabella “Bella” Alvarez, an elementary education student.
He dominates Big Ten football as a freshman. Then, against Ohio State at Camp Randall Stadium, three defenders collide into his planted right knee, tearing the arteries and tissue beyond repair.
Surgeons amputate his right leg above the knee. Gabriel returns home with a carbon-fiber prosthetic, moves into Kennedy’s house, and breaks up with Bella rather than tie her to a disabled life.
An international promoter recruits him into professional wrestling. In London, Gabriel becomes “Anakim, the Amish Giant,” wrestling in full Amish attire across Europe and Asia.
Kennedy takes Hannah to Chicago’s United Center for the “Sizzling Summer Slam.” Hannah flees the arena in tears, disturbed by the violence and by the commercial use of her faith.
While they are away, Absalom Yoder dies in a fire at his home after knocking over an oil lamp in the bathtub. Sorting the ruins, Hannah finds a confession letter.
Absalom writes that he sexually abused his daughters Meg and Rachel. Jasper and Gabriel were both fathered through that incest, which means Gabriel is Hannah’s grandson and her biological half-brother.
Hannah breaks down spiritually. She realizes Josiah suspected the truth and stayed silent, so she leaves him to stay with Kennedy.
She begins a late-life “Senior Rumspringa,” trading her kapp for English clothes, reading secular books, and seeing the wider world. She and Kennedy develop a chaste, deep affection.
Gabriel, meanwhile, goes blind while performing in Spain at twenty-two. Tests in London find a massive inoperable brain tumor on his pituitary gland, the cause of his gigantism, now spread through his spine, lungs, and liver.
He comes home to Lakota to die in Kennedy’s house. Beathard tracks down Bella, who arrives with her two-year-old son, Raphael—Gabriel’s child, conceived before London.
Hannah reconciles with Josiah and returns to her home and her faith. She helps nurse Gabriel alongside Bella, Abiah, and Kennedy as his strength fades.
On the morning of August 2nd, Gabriel lies dying on Kennedy’s flagstone patio. Hundreds of birds of every species gather in the trees, and deer, raccoons, otters, opossums, and foxes step out of the woods without fear.
A blinding, swirling column of tens of thousands of fireflies descends over his bed. As the cloud rises into the dawn sky, Gabriel draws his last breath.
Abram Glick builds a ten-foot quartersawn oak coffin. Gabriel is buried in the Cemetery of Peace beside his mother Rachel and his brother Jasper, and the town enforces a blackout on news vans and social media.
After the funeral, Billy Walton marries Estelle Smithson. Bella buys Kennedy’s house with Gabriel’s earnings and raises Raphael in Lakota near his great-grandparents.
Seventy-one-year-old Kennedy sells his practice and moves to a rustic cabin on the Missouri River in Montana. Hannah and Josiah live out their remaining years together, finding solace in forgiveness, family, and memory.
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Characters in This Book
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Gabriel Fisher (“Anakim”) | Born at eighteen pounds and grows past eight feet due to pituitary gigantism; plays baseball, football, and professional wrestling before dying at twenty-two. |
| Rachel Fisher | Gabriel and Jasper’s mother, shunned by her Amish church at sixteen; dies moments after delivering Gabriel. |
| Hannah Fisher | Gabriel’s maternal grandmother and, through Absalom’s abuse, his biological half-sister; her viewpoint anchors much of the novel. |
| Josiah Fisher | Hannah’s husband, an Amish carpenter and goat farmer who raises Gabriel after Jasper’s death. |
| Dr. Thomas Kennedy | Milwaukee veterinarian who relocated to Lakota after his wife’s suicide; delivers Gabriel and later cares for him while terminally ill. |
| Jasper Fisher | Gabriel’s older half-brother, who raises him as an infant and hangs himself in the barn when Gabriel is nine. |
| Billy Walton | Owner of the tavern Shaken, Not Stirred, a former amateur baseball player who coaches Gabriel in T-ball. |
| Trey Beathard | Waushara High School football coach and recovering addict who recruits Gabriel to play football. |
| Absalom Yoder | Hannah’s father and owner of the local sawmill; a letter found after his death reveals he abused his daughters. |
| Charlotte Chesterfield | Atheist neighbor who shelters the shunned Rachel and leaves her farm to Rachel. |
| Isabella “Bella” Alvarez | Gabriel’s college girlfriend at UW-Madison and mother of his son, Raphael. |
| Raphael Alvarez Fisher | Son of Gabriel and Bella, brought to Lakota as a toddler. |
| Abiah | Hannah Fisher’s closest Amish friend and confidante. |
| Meg (Margaret) | Hannah’s older sister, who left home as a teenager and lives among the Amish in Pennsylvania. |
| Colt Bender | Gabriel’s tattooed college football roommate at UW-Madison. |
| Chinua “Chin” Ngobo | Adopted high school running back from Burkina Faso who plays alongside Gabriel. |
| Estelle Smithson | Local widow who marries Billy Walton after Gabriel’s funeral. |
| Angela Kennedy | Thomas Kennedy’s late wife, who died by suicide after five miscarriages. |
| Abram Glick | Amish cobbler who makes Gabriel’s oversized footwear and builds his coffin. |
What the Novel Holds Beneath the Surface
| Theme | How the Book Presents It |
|---|---|
| Faith, Suffering, and Divine Affliction | Hannah Fisher spends decades measuring her grief against the Amish teaching of submission to God’s will. She watches her grandson suffer and cannot reconcile the loss with the doctrine she was raised in. |
| Separation vs. Belonging | The Old Order Amish value gelassenheit, humility, and separation from modern technology. Gabriel’s football and wrestling careers pull him into stadiums, television cameras, and endorsement money, and the two worlds cannot hold together. |
| The Spectacle and Burden of the Extraordinary | Gabriel’s size makes him a public attraction from childhood. Coaches, promoters, and crowds benefit from his body while he remains isolated inside it. |
| Hidden Sin, Guilt, and Redemption | Absalom Yoder’s confession letter reframes two generations of the Fisher family. Kennedy carries guilt over Angela’s death, Beathard over his addiction, and Hannah over her silence. |
| Humanity and Nature | Gabriel calms animals from infancy, Kennedy builds his life around veterinary care, and the novel ends with wildlife and fireflies gathering at Gabriel’s deathbed. |
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Quotes from Life, and Death, and Giants
“Sometimes, it isn’t where you’re going, but rather what you’re running from that determines where you find yourself. For people like that, Lakota felt like a refuge, because above all, the locals treasured anonymity, the rare luxury of being left alone.”
“My mother used to say we Amish have much that is beautiful about America without accepting her ugliness.”
“Baseball is just a boys’ game. Grown men are paid well for playing, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a game.”
“My dear mother would have said you can’t put a pumpkin back into its seed.”
“Youth is a seemingly bottomless gift, but it has a short shelf life.”
“What is forgiveness but an undeserved gift given, light as air, beautiful as a moonlit ride home?”
Books Like Life, and Death, and Giants
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger — Shares a rural Midwestern setting, a lyrical voice, themes of faith and family devotion, and subtle miraculous events.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving — Centers on a physically unusual protagonist whose gifts appear fated for a tragic purpose, set against small-town life and questions of belief.
Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult — Depicts the collision between Old Order Amish tradition and the modern American legal and media system, with hidden community secrets.
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen — Features a deep bond between humans and animals, a traveling spectacle, and wounded characters finding sanctuary in unlikely places.
The Green Mile by Stephen King — Tells the story of an impossibly large gentle giant with mysterious grace whose path transforms everyone near him.
