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 to tell it.
Rosemary Cooke narrates this story for us, and the narration style pretty much made up the whole reason that I disliked the book. I’m starting to get tired of this trend of unreliable narrators who won’t tell you what the hell is happening until halfway book, so maybe I would have liked this better if I’d read it a year ago. As it stands, I’m tired of starting in the middle and working my way backwards/forwards — which is exactly how Rosemary wants to tell her story. Beyond the storytelling style, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves tells the story of a family — a strange one, but aren’t they all.
The Cookes have two children: Rosemary, who’s five when some bad shit goes down, and Lowell, an angry 11 year old. They also have a third “child” — a chimp named Fern who’s raised alongside Rosemary until she’s sent away at the age of five. We don’t find out that Fern’s a chimp until about 1/4 of the way through the book (although apparently some versions of the cover spoiled this — either way, I had no idea). I hated that the author kept it a secret — it seemed so incredibly unnecessary and didn’t not add to my enjoyment of the story (which twists normally do). The rest of the book deals with modern day, college-age Rosemary’s attempts to contact her brother (who disappeared a decade ago) and recover her memories of the summer that Fern left.
One thing that I didn’t really see mentioned in any other reviews, but might have stopped me from reading this one (Cait, you paying attention?): there’s a lot of not nice things happening to animals here. Fern ends up in a terrible place for over a decade, some cats die horribly, there’s a lot of discussion of research animals and how they’re treated (not great). I understand that these things happen in real life and we should be discussing them and/or stopping them — but that doesn’t mean I like doing so and a lot of the images in this book really upset me.