We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; now that she's started college, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone—vanished from her life. Her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man. And there was something unique about Rosemary's sister, Fern.
You'll have to find out for yourself what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other.

What a wonderful idea for a story! I’d heard of the experiment, years ago, but putting it into novel form really brought home the unforeseen consequences of such an experiment, though some should have been seen from the start.

Funny, sad, light, deep, the book is everything someone should want in a story. I loved following Rosemary’s journal through self discovery. What happens to us as children stays with us for a lifetime; that premise is shown in all its complexity here. It’s a short novel, and slow to start, but it’s a captivating story.




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26. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler










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