The great thing about England is that there are book exchanges to be found everywhere. Free books after you’ve done your grocery shopping? Like. Could England be anymore unreal. I’d seen some reviews for Karen Joy Fowler’s We are all completely beside ourselves I don’t remember the reviews per se, just a sense of good reviews and a very yellow cover. So I picked it up at my local tesco’s and it sat in my TBR pile for quite a while. Until […]
Odd collection of stories from a writer I can’t quite figure out.
So I have only read one of Karen Joy Fowler’s books before: We are Completely Beside Ourselves. I really liked it. It’s about a family who raises a chimp alongside their other child and its various fallouts. It’s good. But I also know her as the author of The Jane Austen Book Club which could be good, but I am suspicious of any book circulating around Jane Austen and her books because there’s so many of them. And then her other books come with a variety of mixed […]
Strange Sisters
When Rosemary is five, she is sent to her grandparents. She doesn’t know what’s happened to her sister Fern. When she is returns home the family has moved from their farmhouse and orchard to a house in town and Fern is gone. Rosemary’s older brother is angry, her mother is grieving and her father starts to drink. What has happened to the missing child, Fern? Well, turns out Fern is a chimpanzee. I came to We are All Completely beside Ourselves biased. A few years […]
Family Matters
This is a book that works best when you go in without knowing much. To fully explain the plot of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is its own kind of spoiler. The plot is centered around a secret, or more accurately, around a reveal. I went into the book already knowing the “twist” that’s revealed about 80 pages into the book and I spent those pages going “aha. I see that hint. I know what’s going to happen.” I wonder how […]
Caitlin D — don’t read this one
A lot of y’all reviewed this one for CBR, and it seems like we’re pretty divided between loving it and hating it. I didn’t hate it, but I definitely fall in the “frustrated by this book” category. And I thought the twist was stupid, so I’m going to spoil it here — be warned. The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how […]
We’re all just animals in the end.
I read Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club several years ago and really liked it a lot, but I hadn’t thought to look up anything else by her. Several people had talked up We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and I saw the audiobook at my local library. Why not? I thought. So I let it unfold on me slowly, but I found it was a book that quickly gained my interest while I commuted to and from work. Rosemary Cooke is our […]