Why did I love this book?
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So goes the great Anna Karenina quote by Tolstoy, and what lies at the center of the Cooke family unhappiness is as singular and surprising as it gets.
Narrator Rosemary Cooke reveals her extraordinary family secret in flashbacks interwoven with the present-day narrative. What elevated this book for me was the deep dive into the emotional life of Rosemary and her brother Lowell as they discover and then navigate the secret that destroyed their family.
The secret - which is the premise for this novel - is genius, but I won’t reveal it here as the shock is part of what makes the book stand out. Riveting, tragic, and wise - this is one of Karen Joy Fowler's best novels.
10 authors picked We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family that is ordinary in every way but one in this novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse…