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Title details for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler - Available

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler
Orlagh Cassidy
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family that is ordinary in every way but one in this novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
 
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her as a sister.” As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.
In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler weaves her most accomplished work to date—a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.
“A gripping, big-hearted book...through the tender voice of her protagonist, Fowler has a lot to say about family, memory, language, science, and indeed the question of what constitutes a human being.”—Khaled Hosseini 

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 22, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593862629
      • File size: 257812 KB
      • Duration: 08:57:06

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Karen Joy Fowler (THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB) casts a clear-eyed look at the traumatic results of an innocent, if misguided, undertaking. In a time when cross-species fostering is encouraged to chart the effects on both animal and human children, the Cooke family adopts a baby chimpanzee, intended to grow up alongside their children. Orlagh Cassidy makes it clear that human siblings Rosemary and Lowell consider the chimp, Fern, their sister, not just a medical experiment. Cassidy delivers the complex sibling rivalry between Fern and Rosemary with genuine understanding. Later, as Rosemary uncovers repressed memories, particularly about Fern, who disappeared when Rosemary was 5, the causes of their mother's subsequent depression and their father's alcoholism, as well as Lowell's animal rights activism, become clear. Cassidy's performance offers an electric combination of understatement and highly charged emotions. Powerful listening. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 22, 2013
      It’s worth the trouble to avoid spoilers, including the ones on the back cover, for Fowler’s marvelous new novel; let her introduce the troubled Cooke family before she springs the jaw-dropping surprise at the heart of the story. Youngest daughter Rosemary is a college student acting on dangerous impulses; her first connection with wild-child Harlow lands the two in jail. Rosemary and the FBI are both on the lookout for her brother Lowell, who ran away after their sister Fern vanished. Rosemary won’t say right away what it was that left their mother in a crippling depression and their psychology professor father a bitter drunk, but she has good reasons for keeping quiet; what happens to Fern is completely shattering, reshaping the life of every member of the family. In the end, when Rosemary’s mother tells her, “I wanted you to have an extraordinary life,” it feels like a fairy-tale curse. But Rosemary’s experience isn’t only heartbreak; it’s a fascinating basis for insight into memory, the mind, and human development. Even in her most broken moments, Rosemary knows she knows things that no one else can know about what it means to be a sister, and a human being. Fowler’s (The Jane Austen Book Club) great accomplishment is not just that she takes the standard story of a family and makes it larger, but that the new space she’s created demands exploration. Agent: Wendy Weil, the Wendy Weil Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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