Claire is...

BOOK 133: WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES: KAREN JOY FOWLER

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.

Now her 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 fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined.

(Goodreads.com)

MY VERDICT: I don’t have a lot of time for a well thought out review but I will give an overview of what I thought.  The primary idea is a good one (don’t worry no spoilers here.) There is a twist (although not as monumental as the blurb and reviews would have you believe.) I just feel that the wonderful idea behind the book was lost by an almost boring narrator who pushes away anything that might be interesting for relevant plot points that need hitting to tell the version of the story she wants to tell. The most annoying thing was how the twist was revealed, it literally took any shock or enjoyment at discovering a new point of view on the story and spoilt it by being condescending. I was looking forward to the twist and that spoilt it.  I read to the end but was genuinely disappointed, I was always reading on thinking it would get better. And I didn’t get the relevance of the 60-something year old author setting a book mostly in the late 90s narrated by a 20-something?