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

Most of us really enjoyed Fowler's look at familial and scientific ethics. The essential mystery of the book is the role Fern plays in Rosemary's life, and how Fern's presence shaped Rosemary's childhood. This leads Fowler to explore interesting complexities about what is good about experimentation, animal research, and activism. Most of us at NUBClub enjoyed Rosemary's voice as narrator; she has a beautiful sarcastic take on everything that's happening, and Fowler captures a wonderfully darkly humorous tone that swings into pathos smoothly and powerfully. Most of us found ourselves caught up in the ways Rosemary tries to recreate her family dynamics in the world, how her brother Lowell serves as an ethic foil to Rosemary's ambivalence, and how Rosemary and her parents understand their relationship after everything with Fern comes to a end. A few NUBClubbers were turned off by the content of the book, arguing that the animal experimentation in the book was all obvious stuff to say and thus boring to read, but most of us thought the animal experimentation component was simply a tool to get at the heart of what Fowler was interested in -- what are the responsibilities of a parent to a child, and how do we deal with trauma of our childhoods as we become adults. For most of us, Fowler explored those issues with wit and eloquence, and thus we give the book our full recommendation.