(no subject)

[skygiants]

obopolsk recommended me We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves a few months ago, but refused to tell me what it was about. At that point I did not really have a sense of Karen Joy Fowler as an author, except for a vague impression that she had written a rom-com about a Jane Austen book club and an even vaguer memory that she'd written a short story once that I liked. So I was sort of surprised to find that I couldn't put We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves down.

Now that I've read it I get why obopolsk would not tell me anything about it, just because the book itself makes SUCH a production of not revealing its Big Plot Twist Premise until about a third of the way through. The vague version is that the protagonist Rosemary is tooling around at college, and what you know is that her brother and sister are both completely gone from her family for mysterious reasons that eventually will go to make up the central themes of the novel, and you spend the first third frantically reading to find out what those reasons are.

I have mixed feelings myself about the way the book plays around with its reveal, and some of you I suspect will either be annoyed by the mystery or would like to know going in, so I'll put it under here for spoiler-cut: Rosemary's sister Fern is a baby chimp who was raised alongside Rosemary from their infancy as her 'twin' as part of an experiment in chimp development, but eventually the experiment was called off and Fern disappeared from the family, who maintained a subsequent unspoken agreement to NEVER SPEAK OF HER EVER. This raising-the-chimp-with-the-kid thing is actually a thing that has actually been tried a couple times, and the book is about exploring the effect that would have on a family -- to be raised in the rock-solid knowledge that this person is your sister, and then suddenly have her recategorized as an experimental animal.

Games around the reveal aside ... it's a good book. It's a really good book. It was hard for me not to compare it to Boy, Snow, Bird, just because that was the last time a first-person narration pulled me in so completely, but FORTUNATELY there was no greatly offensive narrative betrayal lurking in the last few chapters, so that's all right. Karen Joy Fowler has this amazing sense of witty weirdness. Like, at one point there's an accidentally swapped suitcase that turns out to contain a puppet in a mob cap and knitting needles. The characters name her Madame Defarge and take her out clubbing. Madame Defarge is basically a MacGuffin, and there's absolutely no reason that particular MacGuffin had to be a puppet version of Madame Defarge, but why not? WHY NOT. That's the enjoyment factor, on a micro level -- the wit and the weirdness -- but on the macro level the book has serious weight and heft to it. It's tackling big themes, about family and responsibility and what it means to be human and what human beings do to the world around them, and it leaves you with all the questions that it should.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Good to know that there is no last-minute reader betrayal. I neither liked nor disliked Jane Austen Book Club; I do have lingering fondness for Sarah Canary.

[skygiants]

This is also good to know! I caught the Jane Austen Book Club film once on TV (or of it, or most of it, I dunno) and likewise had pretty much zero opinions about it, but a movie is not a book anyway.

[luzula]

This has been on my to-read list for a while, but I haven't gotten around to it yet!

[skygiants]

Every so often I'm grateful for the weirdly competitive relationship I have with the library that causes me to count it a PERSONAL FAILURE if I return a book that I've checked out unread.

[houseboatonstyx]

Sounds like the kind of book I read backwards! I hope they succeed in rescuing her....

[skygiants]

It's not hopeless but there are also no easy answers! Both of which I appreciated, really.

[obopolsk]

I think I did have some sense of what the book was about going in -- from Publisher's Marketplace summaries or something like that -- so the reveal wasn't a complete surprise to me. And I think I would have been fine with it being revealed upfront, because for me the more interesting things about the novel were the family dynamics and the psych stuff, and none of that was really dependent on Fern's identity being a surprise.

Anyway, I'm glad you liked it!

[skygiants]

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I was curious, so the mystery definitely made me turn pages quickly, but ... I mean, I was turning pages at the same rate after, too. The premise is good and interesting in itself! No reason not to lead with that!