Potential Grammar Fail

While reading a description of a book, I came across this passage:

[The Author] skips ahead years at a time, often eliding major conflict resolutions, character development and deaths...

The present participle eliding comes from the root elide, which is defined by most reputable dictionaries as:

1. Omit, or
2. Merge

As one can see, elide can mean one of two distinct things. Either you omit something or you bring two or more things together.  So, which one did the review writer mean?  Here is the same quote with each definition in place of eliding:

[The Author] skips ahead years at a time, often omitting major conflict resolutions, character development and deaths...

[The Author] skips ahead years at a time, often merging major conflict resolutions, character development and deaths...

Sadly, each meaning of elide works, and this is why the use of eliding in this text—without further clarification—is a grammar FAIL.  Fortunately, there is a clue to the real meaning later in the passage.  Here is the more complete quote with the clue:

[The Author] skips ahead years at a time, often eliding major conflict resolutions, character development and deaths; this choice disrupts the storytelling but smartly underscores the isolation in which the characters often operate.

It is not crystal clear, but one can safely surmise that the use of eliding, paired with isolation, indicates omissions. Yea! We figured it out!

Bring on the cake!

The problem, and in my opinion still a Fail, is that the reader needs to backtrack from "isolation" to "eliding" in order to glean an appropriate understanding of the description's real meaning. It would have been so much clearer and simpler if, instead of "eliding", the author of the description instead used "omitting" or "merging", or some similar version thereof.