We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

 

This thought provoking novel explores the bonds between humans and animals.  It's about family and loss and how each member deals with that loss.  It's funny and intriguing and really hard to review without giving too much of it away, as the joy is in peeling back the layers slowly and savoring all that is revealed.  So, let me just give you the bare bones synopsis and urge you to just give it a try.

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.