we are all completely beside ourselves by karen joy fowler

'It occurred to me that I was going to miss my afternoon class. 'I knew nothing about Jean Harlow except that she was maybe in Gone With the Wind, which I’d never seen nor ever wanted to see. She threw a spoon that bounced audibly off his forehead.

'A young man rose from his seat, telling her, with a slight stutter, to take a chill pill. I’m just saying), but honestly I don’t remember.' 'There must have been music in the background, because there’s always music in the background now, our whole lives sound-tracked (and most of it too ironic to be random. 'At lunchtime I grabbed something, probably grilled cheese, let’s say it was grilled cheese, in the school cafeteria.' Under spoiler, because I like to think I'm merciful. I've collected my favorite eye-rolling sentences and wish to subject to you the same level of pain I was forced to endure. That's really all I have to say about that. My favorite characters were the high-flying Harlow and probably the narrator's brother, who actually do something in this book and give it a semblance of color. Our narrator is spoiled and somehow untreated for mental illness despite a psychologist father, and the flightiness of her relationships to even her own surroundings was annoying. I was just not convinced, and the poor development of the novel didn't help. I still don't like it.Īt the end of the day I get it-animals are 'people' to in the large definition of shared compassioned and feeling-and like heck, sure.

Backpeddaling and excusing herself of the banalest of situations, I felt adrift and lost as to what to possibly glean from this. Please enlighten me if you have the understanding as to why the author decided to have the narrator have 'false' memories-so many pages taken up by scenes only to be left with the realization they're probably contrived. I do believe paint drying has more life than Ms. Most pages are whiled away with mind-numbing details of our narrator, Rosemary Cooke's uneventful and boring days.

It probably didn’t help that I’ve never cared much for animals (I’m a humanist through and through feel free to revoke my humanity points at any date available), but beyond this disparity of interests (science, animals, psychology, lazy writing, to name a few) the overall book was not only shoddily put together but neophyte in so many turns of phrase (how fanfic it felt at times). Like I can’t believe I had to finish it bad. It's really a shame that I only liked the last 50 pages.

We are all completely beside ourselves by karen joy fowler