This week at the Gilpin Library
by Larry Grieco, Librarian
Karen Joy Fowler is back for the sixth time with an unforgettable novel about a most unusual family. The story is told by Rosemary Cooke who, as a child never stopped talking, and as an adult has “wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover.” Something in the family went terribly awry, and each member is having to weather the effects. As the story unfolds, Rosemary’s adored older brother, Lowell, is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. Likewise changed is her once lively mother, now “a shell of her former self,” and her “clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.” That brings us to Fern, Rosemary’s “beloved sister,” whose fate is “far more terrible than the family, in their innocence, could ever have imagined.” The title is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and here is what Kelly Link, an author herself, wrote: “A funny, stingingly smart, and heartbreaking book. Among other things, it’s about love, family, loss, and secrets. And it’s about the acquisition and the loss of language. It’s also about two sisters, Rosemary and Fern, who are unlike any other sisters you’ve ever met before.”
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