“There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.”
Genre: Fiction
Book Jacket Synopsis: “[Meet] the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind. It changed Rosemary – and it destroyed her family. Now Rosemary’s adored older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man. And Fern, Rosemary’s beloved sister, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief? Fern’s is a far more terrible fate than the family, in their innocence, could ever have imagined.”
Review: I must admit; I am completely beside myself with We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. This novel is tremendous. As the cover says, it has one of the best twists I’ve ever read (no spoilers in this review, I promise). A major reason this novel is so successful is the narration. Rosemary is an unreliable narrator (far better than Rachel from The Girl on the Train) and reveals the secrets of her past in a disjointed, non-chronological order. She starts in the middle of her story, before jumping back, forward, back again. This method of storytelling was fascinating, as reading about each “version” of Rosemary gradually helped me understand what had happened to her family.
“My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.”
Fowler’s writing is exquisite. She transported me into each moment and was extremely effective at turning Rosemary’s feelings into my own. There’s a particularly beautiful scene where Mrs. Cooke helps her daughters get ready to play in the snow; the elation both girls feel is tangible. When Rosemary was jealous, I felt jealous. When she was sad, I felt sad. It’s no small feat to incorporate a reader into a fictional world, and Fowler excels at it.
“It wasn’t the flashes of anger – he’s been angry for as long as I could remember, a foot-stamping, middle-finger-thrusting, boy-shaped storm. I was used to that. His fury was my nostalgia.”
I can’t go into too much additional detail without running the risk of spoiling We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, but I can safely say that this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Beautiful prose, a captivating story, and a flawed but redemptive heroine; what more can a reader ask for?
Rating:
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