We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Karen Joy Fowler
The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family, ordinary in every way but one... Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, Lowell, Rosemary and her unusual sister Fern. Rosemary begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “Until Fern’s expulsion...,” Rosemary says, “she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her.” As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence. In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler weaves her most accomplished work to date—a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.
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-While I was listening to this book, I was underwhelmed. I'd probably have never picked it up myself, and may have DNF'ed if it hadn't been a book club choice and it was decently short.
---a member of my club had said it had a chimp in the book, but this element isn't 'revealed' by the narrator until ~30%. At ~28% I paused to read the blurb, just to make sure I was reading the right book, and that fact is IN THE BLURB! So that's stupid, for the description to have that info.
-This book has a strong message about animal rights and how humans basically suck, and this was handled quite bluntly and hammered home in the last chunk of the book
For me, the best part of this reading experience was that during my book club discussion, I was quite intellectually stimulated by the topics brought up: philosophical and psychological ideas on 'humanity' and what it means to 'be a person', and the comparisons of a human child development to the same age chimpanzee. I loved ruminating on the psychology sprinkled throughout, and mentions of memory and feeling were great, especially with thinking about traits that humans tend to attribute entirely to ourselves.
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