We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
by Karen Joy Fowler · 2013
Buy on AmazonMeet 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 is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister. . . . Until Fern's expulsion . . . she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. . . . I loved her as a sister." 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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"One of the great masterpieces of 2013, the latest novel from Jane Austen Book Club author Karen Joy Fowler is based on several experiments in the 1970s where anthropologists raised chimps with their own children to see what would happen. The result is a heartbreakingly recognizable dysfunctional family, whose problem child is sent away to an institution after a series of violent incidents. Except in this case, the institution is an animal experimentation center — and the troubled children who remain behind struggle to understand what it means to be human after growing up with a sister whom the world sees as an animal."
NPR Books We Love — 2013 · apps.npr.org
"I thought that Kingsolver, who loved both books, was right on the money."
By the Book: Ann Patchett · nytimes.com
"Karen Joy Fowler because We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is one of the best books I've ever read in my life."
By the Book: Attica Locke · nytimes.com
"Also stacked are the books I have recently read and loved: "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves," by Karen Joy Fowler."
By the Book: Jodi Picoult · nytimes.com