Back
Karen Joy Fowler: We are all completely beside ourselves (2013, G.P. Putnam's Sons) 5 stars

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins …

A Grounded, Complex Look at Intersecting Worlds

5 stars

This was the first book I picked up this year. I think about it all the time, and it's one that I expect I shall revisit. There's a lot going on here: individual and familial conflict and splintering in loss; some of the potential effects of choosing an active, militant, radical, underground life; the close, easy bonds between people and the "natural" world we inhabit, and the ways that these are distorted and ruptured by contemporary social structures; and on.

I think that any radical—especially those interested in animal liberation—should pick this up, at the very least for the lens it offers. But I also think that those who aren't radical will find insights here to hold on to—and may come to understand some pieces of what move the rest of us.