We Are All
Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
This is masterly
and moving. Again, listening to this on audio seemed to somehow add to the
effect. Here is one confessional voice, delivering something between a family
memoir and a scientific report. I won’t spoiler what makes the family at the
heart of this novel unique, but I will say that the book is a heartbreaker. It
makes you rethink what it means to be someone’s child or sibling, and what it
means to be somebody’s responsibility, and how and why people might fail in
that role.
The book moves so
beautifully through various time frames, giving us the middle first and the
beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning. It is restless, intelligent
and told in a jaded tone riven with pain. All the way through it has you hoping
against hope that things will work out okay.
Straight to the
top of the Magrs Top Ten Novels of 2014, I think.
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