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 a spoiler-cut )

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.