book review: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
The backstory: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has been longlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize . It also won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Prize. The basics: Narrated by Rosemary, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is the story of her family: her academic psychologist father, mother, brother Lowell, and sister Fern. Rosemary slowly tells their secrets, but we learn early on she hasn't seen Lowell in ten years and Fern disappeared seventeen years ago. My thoughts: Rosemary is the best kind of unreliable narrator. She's quite honest with the reader about how she's telling this story--out of order. But despite knowing she's not telling a linear story (although it's easy to follow and even enhanced by its structure), she still managed to surprise me more than once with key details she waits to share. She doesn't lie, but she does omit at times. She even tells the reader she's doing it in a beautiful way: "The beauty, the utility of this story is i...