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?
