The Cooke's are, in many ways, your typical family. Mum, dad and 2.5 kids, they bounce around from house to house, avoid confrontation and tease like any other. Or at least they used to. With Rosemary in college, her brother missing and her sister gone, she's successfully avoided any real reflection on it until she meets Harlow, a loud, brash, impulsive woman who gets them both overnighting in prison. In the space of a night, Rosemary finds her life changed forever, as the lid gets ripped off her past and years of simmering starts to overflow.
I can barely articulate my feelings towards this book. Funny, tragic, traumatising, where cruelty and kindness appear in the strangest places and people, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is unlike any book I've ever read. Rosemary is smart, savvy, weak, angry and ultimately unreliable, and her reflections on the past are told in and out of time, like someone keeps turning an hourglass over and over before the sand can ever hit the bottom. The effect should be jarring, but Fowler has such a handle on it, such an intimate knowledge of these characters and this situation, that ultimately nothing happens in isolation. It's pretty damn magical.
5 out of 5 red poker chips.
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