
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
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Narrated by:
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Orlagh Cassidy
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By:
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Karen Joy Fowler
The New York Times best-selling 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.
©2012 Karen Joy Fowler (P)2013 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"A novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get.... [Its] fresh diction and madcap plot bend the tone toward comedy, but it never mislays its solemn raison d’être. Monkeyshines aside, this is a story of Everyfamily in which loss engraves relationships, truth is a soulful stalker and coming-of-age means facing down the mirror, recognizing the shape-shifting notion of self." (Barbara Kingsolver, The New York Times Book Review)
"Fowler’s interests here are in what sets humans apart from their fellow primates. Cognitive, language and memory skills all come into playful question. But the heart of the novel - and it has a big, warm, loudly beating heart throughout - is in its gradually pieced-together tale of family togetherness, disruption and reconciliation. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is Fowler at her best, mixing cerebral and emotional appeal together in an utterly captivating manner." (The Seattle Times)
"Elegantly and humorously orchestrated.... Knitting together Rosemary’s at times poignant, at times hilarious scraps of uncovered memories, Fowler creates a fantastical tale of raw, animalistic love." (O, The Oprah Magazine)
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The author managed to hold back the key fact or surprise of the book until the book’s second quarter, no small authorial feat. (You are not going to find out from me). The plot turns on a volatile moment in behavioral psychology, the late 1970s, when Skinner dogmatists were fighting it out with proponents of a more nuanced, evolutionary grasp of behavior. The novel’s narrator, Rosemary Cook, claims to care about none of this. Her snappy storytelling and occasional wise cracks, use of the second person engages the reader/observer directly. This is a story of every family in which loss engraves relationships.
Fowler is an excellent writer and oh, what a way she has with words. I suggest you keep a dictionary handy. One of my favorite narrators, Orlagh Cassidy narrated the book.
A madcap plot
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Enjoyable
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entertaining and thought provoking
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compelling and unpredictable
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Loved every minute’
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Fern and Rosemary, are two sisters who are separated. As sister separations tend to do, this act unhinged the family, but there is hope for a brighter tomorrow. I can't say more without spoiling it for you, so just trust me on this one.
Completely Beside Myself! Read This!
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If you could sum up We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves in three words, what would they be?
Brilliant and funnyAny additional comments?
I ended up reading rather than listening to this book. I don't like to write negatively about anyone--or think I don't--but the way this is read somehow keeps you from hearing the very clever humor and style.Wonderful Book but Robotically Read
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Try to keep it all separate.
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Gripping and suspenseful. Cannot predict where this story will go.
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Wonderful book but a flat narration
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