We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

This is novel that I shied away from reading for quite some time, despite the solid reviews it was garnering. The blurbs I would come upon centering on Karen Fowler's latest novel were along the lines of "a story of a girl and a chimp raised as sisters in a madcap family" and didn't move me to pick up the book.  But after stumbling across more and more positive reviews, I decided to go for it...and am very happy that I did.

This is the story of a family living an experiment.  It is told through the eyes of Rosemary, and moves back and forth in time, more or less starting in the middle.  Rosemary's father is a psychology professor at a university in Indiana.  Rosemary lives in a household that doubles as a lab filled with graduate students and witnesses to a closely watched experiment. When Rosemary is born, she is "twinned" with Fern, a chimpanzee.  Rosemary and Fern become inseparable until...something happens.  Rosemary is sent to stay at Grandma's house for a few weeks and upon her return home, discovers that Fern is gone.  The grad students are gone, her older brother is silent and grief-stricken, her mother is a mere shell of her former self, and her father has retreated into alcoholism.  No one has any answers for Rosemary's many questions; the house becomes a silent, grief-filled tomb and Rosemary does not know why.  Eventually, she is told Fern has been sent to a "farm" where she will be "much happier" living with other chimps and the young Rosemary eventually accepts this, until during her college years, she discovers the truth is very different.

The story is engaging, smart, sad, and witty.  Rosemary's journey towards the truth about Fern is a difficult one, made more complex by the shifting truths she must face about her family as well as herself.

"Maybe later, after Fern left, I saw how I should have felt and revised my memory accordingly.  People do that. People do that all the time." 

Indeed they do.

My rating ***