To experience this novel exactly as the author intended, a reader should avoid the flap copy and everything else written about it. Including this review. The last writers to be unscathed by spoilers were probably the Victorians, who pounded out the likes of "Great Expectations" in weekly, serialized installments. No reviewer could blow the surprise of a convict benefactor or Miss Havisham's cobwebby cake when these were yet unwritten. But in modern times, literary fiction presents a conundrum: The more craftily constructed its suspense, the more it tempts its advocates - in the interest of airtime - to reach into a serious tale and pull out something resembling a tabloid headline. Such as: "Girl and Chimp Twinned at Birth in Psychological Experiment." That's the big reveal in Karen Joy Fowler's "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves," a novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get. Holding back that surprise until the book's second quarter is no small authorial feat. But the chimp pops right up in the publisher's promotional material, and ducking it here would disallow mention of many elements that inform this sly work of art, including science and history. The plot turns on a volatile moment in behavioral psychology, the late 1970s, when Skinnerian dogmatists were duking it out with proponents of a more nuanced, evolutionary grasp of animal behavior. Primate subjects were prized for the ways they resembled humans in mirror-identity tests, language acquisition and more, but could still be dispatched as property at the end of the experimental day. Meanwhile, a fledgling animal rights movement was starting to count the bodies. The novel's narrator, Rosemary Cooke, claims to care about exactly none of this. As the daughter of a psychology professor at Indiana University, she's an ideal informant: witty, skeptical and duly damaged. Her snappy storytelling and occasional wisecracking use of the second person engage the reader-observer directly. No surprise there, as she has lived an observed life from the get-go, in a long household experiment with an adopted chimpanzee for a twin sister. Where other kids had preschool and baby sitters, Rosemary had lab exercises and grad students, and the omnipresent, amber-eyed, diaper-wearing Fern, a hairy, wiry whirlwind of a sister who funnels her lips and scales furniture in a trice and lounges on the tops of doors. Even as a toddler, Rosemary knew their developmental milestones were being compared - ad infinitum, with footnotes. While hopelessly outmatched in strength and dexterity, Rosemary could win any game involving the gift of gab. Fern learned a competent sign language vocabulary but had little use for it because Rosemary spoke up for both of them. Inhaling Fern's every impulse, she was always the first to know that her sister wanted ice cream or a hat. (As a condition of the twin experiment, she'd get one too.) Rosemary became such a talker that her endless stories wore out her parents. "Skip the beginning. Start in the middle," her father advised, counsel that had little effect on a sunny, loquacious child. Until age 5, when she was sent away for a few weeks at Grandma's, not for the usual blessed-event reason but the opposite: she returned to find that she hadn't gained a sibling but lost one. Abruptly, inexplicably, the household was empty of Fern, along with the jolly cadre of grad students and all mention of the experiment. Rosemary grieved for her companion and her intangible sense of purpose as the much-praised interpreter of her special sib's every whim. In a story with many beginnings, this is the molten core: a family's implosion with grief. The father becomes a taciturn drunk, his great experiment a debacle. The mother retreats to stricken silence from which she seems no more likely to recover than any mother who's lost a child. Rosemary's beloved older brother strikes out bitterly on a path of no return. The children are told that Fern has been sent to a "farm." No, they may not go visit; it would disrupt Fern's transition as she learns to socialize with her own kind. Rosemary is expected to do the same. She's thrust wide-eyed into kindergarten, where the other kids instantly sniff out the classmate whose manners and sense of personal space were forged in simian territory. She is branded "the monkey girl," never mind the difference - obvious to 5-year-old Rosemary - between monkeys and apes. She attributes her ostracism to the "uncanny-valley response," wherein people respond ever more positively to robots or images that approximate human likeness, until a breaking point where the almost-but-not-quite human gives us the creeps. Thanks to her years of "baby see, baby do," there's something not-quite-human about Rosemary, and she knows it. The best she can do is survive a friendless childhood and head off to the University of California, Davis, to put half a continent between herself and her reputation. There she finds dorm-mates lobbing stories in an incessant contest of "whose family is the weirdest," a game Rosemary deeply wishes she hadn't won by a mile. She learns to keep her mouth shut. She seems doomed to isolation until the day she collides with Harlow, a drama major whose dish-smashing breakup with her boyfriend in the cafeteria manages to get both herself and Rosemary arrested. Sensible folk would run from Harlow, with her abundant dark hair, wiry energy and zero sense of personal space, but Rosemary is helpless before her charms. An arrest record and endangered G.P.A. are small prices to pay for a friendship that makes her feel whole again for the first time in years. Technically, the novel begins here: in the middle, as her father advised. In Chapter 1 we meet 22-year-old Rosemary, strangely lonely, with a baffling compulsion to imitate this new friend with the wrecking-ball agenda. Rosemary is circumspect about her sad parents, her runaway brother and the sister everyone still misses, introducing herself as someone who lost a sister, period. Fair enough. Subtract the chimp, and her family looks like many others in their lifelong, imperfectly realized quest to reconstitute themselves and atone for old sins. For Rosemary, the hard part is remembering. Gradually, she nets in the past through flashback chapters redacting the family heartbreak. We learn that she is oddly blank on the details of Fern's departure. And that her brother blames her for Fern's removal from the household. The brother who is now wanted by the F.B.I., and was last seen in Davis, Calif. Which is the real reason Rosemary came there to college. Old secrets emerge, unspoiled by this review. Fowler, best known for her novel "The Jane Austen Book Club," is a trustworthy guide through many complex territories: the historical allure and dicey ethics of experimental psychology, not to mention academic families and the college towns of Bloomington and Davis. (It's worth noting that Fowler's father was at one time a psychology professor at Indiana University, studying animal behavior.) The novel's fresh diction and madcap plot - swapped suitcases, a Madame Defarge ventriloquist's dummy, lost bikes and drug-laced coed high jinks - bend the tone toward comedy, but it never mislays its solemn raison d'être. Monkeyshines aside, this is a story of Everyfamily in which loss engraves relationships, truth is a soulful stalker and coming-of-age means facing down the mirror, recognizing the shape-shifting notion of self.

What is the boundary between human and animal beings and what happens when that boundary is blurred are two of many questions raised in Fowler's provocative sixth novel (The Jane Austen Book Club, 2004, etc.), the narration of a young woman grieving over her lost sister, who happens to be a chimpanzee. Rosemary recounts her family history at first haltingly and then with increasingly articulate passion. In 1996, she is a troubled student at U.C. Davis who rarely speaks out loud. She thinks as little as possible about her childhood and the two siblings no longer part of her family. But during a Thanksgiving visit home to Bloomington, Ind., where her father is a psychology professor, that past resurfaces. Rosemary recalls her distress as a 5-year-old when she returned from visiting her grandparents to find her family living in a new house and her sister Fern gone. Denying any memory of why Fern disappeared, she claims to remember only the aftermath: her mother's breakdown; her father's withdrawal; her older brother Lowell's accelerating anger until he left the family at 18 to find Fern and become an animal rights activist/terrorist; her own continuing inability to fit in with human peers. Gradually, Rosemary acknowledges an idyllic earlier childhood when she and Fern were inseparable playmates on a farm, their intact family shared with psych grad students. By waiting to clarify that Fern was a chimpanzee, Rosemary challenges readers to rethink concepts of kinship and selfhood; for Rosemary and Lowell, Fern was and will always be a sister, not an experiment in raising a chimpanzee with human children. And when, after 10 years of silence, Lowell shows up in Davis to describe Fern's current living conditions, he shakes free more memories for Rosemary of her sibling relationship with Fern, the superior twin she loved, envied and sometimes resented. Readers will forgive Fowler's occasional didacticism about animal experimentation since Rosemary's voice--vulnerable, angry, shockingly honest--is so compelling and the cast of characters, including Fern, irresistible. A fantastic novel: technically and intellectually complex, while emotionally gripping.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

It's worth the trouble to avoid spoilers, including the ones on the back cover, for Fowler's marvelous new novel; let her introduce the troubled Cooke family before she springs the jaw-dropping surprise at the heart of the story. Youngest daughter Rosemary is a college student acting on dangerous impulses; her first connection with wild-child Harlow lands the two in jail. Rosemary and the FBI are both on the lookout for her brother Lowell, who ran away after their sister Fern vanished. Rosemary won't say right away what it was that left their mother in a crippling depression and their psychology professor father a bitter drunk, but she has good reasons for keeping quiet; what happens to Fern is completely shattering, reshaping the life of every member of the family. In the end, when Rosemary's mother tells her, "I wanted you to have an extraordinary life," it feels like a fairy-tale curse. But Rosemary's experience isn't only heartbreak; it's a fascinating basis for insight into memory, the mind, and human development. Even in her most broken moments, Rosemary knows she knows things that no one else can know about what it means to be a sister, and a human being. Fowler's (The Jane Austen Book Club) great accomplishment is not just that she takes the standard story of a family and makes it larger, but that the new space she's created demands exploration. Agent: Wendy Weil, the Wendy Weil Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Fowler's (What I Didn't See) engrossing new novel opens with Rosemary Cooke announcing she will be starting her story in the middle. With brother Lowell and sister Fern mysteriously gone, Rosemary is the only remaining child of an alcoholic researcher father and a mother left fragile by the loss of her other two children. Eventually, Rosemary reveals that Fern is a chimpanzee, raised in tandem with her as part of their father's research. Despite this sensational fact, Rosemary's narration keeps listeners grounded in convincing details of her sibling relationship with Fern. Through the stories of the three "children," Fowler examines some very difficult issues with sensitivity and balance. The exploration of ethical and philosophical issues related to the relationships between humans and the animals we interact with and carry out research on flows organically through the characters and never feels tacked on or arbitrary. -Orlagh Cassidy reads the audiobook skillfully and is pleasant to listen to, but her formal tone at times seems a bit out of step with Rosemary's more casual language. Verdict This is an intellectually rewarding novel with a first-person point of view, making it particularly well suited to audio. ["Fowler explores the depths of human emotions and delivers a tragic love story that captures our hearts," read the starred review of the Marian Wood: Penguin hc, LJ 6/1/13.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* As a girl in Indiana, Rosemary, Fowler's breathtakingly droll 22-year-old narrator, felt that she and Fern were not only sisters but also twins. So she was devastated when Fern disappeared. Then her older brother, Lowell, also vanished. Rosemary is now prolonging her college studies in California, unsure of what to make of her life. Enter tempestuous and sexy Harlow, a very dangerous friend who forces Rosemary to confront her past. We then learn that Rosemary's father is a psychology professor, her mother a nonpracticing scientist, and Fern a chimpanzee. Fowler, author of the best-selling The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), vigorously and astutely explores the profound consequences of this unusual family configuration in sustained flashbacks. Smart and frolicsome Fern believes she is human, while Rosemary, unconsciously mirroring Fern, is instantly tagged monkey girl at school. Fern, Rosemary, and Lowell all end up traumatized after they are abruptly separated. As Rosemary lonely, unmoored, and caustically funny ponders the mutability of memories, the similarities and differences between the minds of humans and chimps, and the treatment of research animals, Fowler slowly and dramatically reveals Fern and Lowell's heartbreaking yet instructive fates. Piquant humor, refulgent language, a canny plot rooted in real-life experiences, an irresistible narrator, threshing insights, and tender emotions Fowler has outdone herself in this deeply inquisitive, cage-rattling novel.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist