BOOK REVIEW | WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES

Look at me posting my first ever book review!  I said in a previous post that I'm going to make more of an effort to get into the lifestyle side of blogging, and since I do actually read a lot then I thought reviewing some recent reads would be a good place to start.  

My main Christmas present from my parents this year was a Kindle Fire HD 7, and one of the first books that I downloaded onto it was We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler.  The synopsis gives pretty much nothing away, so I bought it purely because of the hype surrounding it and because I saw that it had one an award or two.  I usually have a favourite couple of genres that I generally go for with books (Historical fiction and...Harry Potter, which is its own genre obvs ;) )and this book very much falls into neither category, so I was a little doubtful that I would enjoy it.  

I can't really say much about this book at all without giving the the big plot 'twist' away, but basically it is the story of a girl called Rosemary, who starts her story by telling us that she never talks to anyone about her family - and ironically the rest of the book revolves around her talking about nothing but.  The story is a good one, and the twist was certainly unexpected (to me, anyway), and as I read on I learned a fair bit on a subject that many of us are probably quite ignorant on, which made me feel quite bad.  But, as much as I enjoyed those aspects of it, I found it quite annoying the way the narrative jumped between different times of Rosemary's life - and this resulted in me finding Rosemary herself pretty annoying too.  There is not much dialogue throughout either, which means it's mainly you hearing Rosemary's memories (or false memories, I didn't care which by the end) and her piecing together bits of her childhood etc.  

This book divided me; I think it is a good book that does an excellent job of getting its point across and also informing the reader of some nasty truths - I just didn't always like the way that it was told! 

I hope that wasn't too much of a shabby first book review!  Let me know what you think, and also whether you've read this book - would love to know if you enjoyed it or not! xx