Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What if we’re underwhelmed instead?

We are all Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

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Karen Joy Fowler’s book starts in the middle with a bang, with her main character, Rosemary Cooke, away at college and undergoing some youthful rebellion. Rosemary tells us of what seems like her idyllic early life back in the mid-west: she has two loving parents, an older brother, Lowell, and a younger sister, Fern. Lowell is someone to look up to while Fern is Rosemary’s shadow half- they are raised to do everything together, dressed in matching outfits and speak in their own language. Rosemary […]

Where I’m reminded expectations can kill

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Ten years ago, I was preparing for summer calculus courses to fulfill prerequisites for graduate programs in biostatistics. Good times. I ended up getting in to a top (and very expensive) masters program on the east coast, and then I lasted two weeks into the second quarter before admitting I’d made a terrible mistake, packing my few possessions into a rental car, and driving myself back across the country to an unfamiliar Sacramento apartment my partner had rented after moving north from Los Angeles to […]

Family.

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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 […]

Strange Sisters

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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

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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 […]

I AM NOT PLEASED

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Oh We Are Completely Besides Ourselves, why is such an awesome title wasted on a book I didn’t like? I did not like this book guys. I actively detested the point of the narrative from about halfway through. I cannot honestly suggest it to you, but I feel a little bad about that since it did work for other people.  Seriously, I think I’m the only one on Cannonball Read who rated it below four stars. So, take my review with a grain of salt. […]



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