We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: Book Reviews #1

You know what is one of the best things about living in London? Well, for me anyway. Walking around small streets you have never wandered around in a rainy day and finding a small private book sell. People there are so sweet and innocent, they just leave their precious books right there on the street and let you take whatever you like in the return of just 50p. That is so far the sweetest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.

That is the cheesy story of how I encountered “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”. Why I chose this one in particular, one would ask. While I generally enjoy reading absolutely everything – from crime to romance, to fantasy, to classic – I mostly, enjoy reviewing contemporary novels. And there are so many of them that if you just pick a random one, it is more likely for it to be absolute nonsense. “One of the best twists in years’, its front page said and I was intrigued. Another thing that is more likely to draw me in is the cover itself – and this one in particular, is appealing.

Now, to the actual book – a story of a seemingly ordinary family, at least in the beginning.  It is a tale of sibling love and there are many novels dedicated to this topic but not many melt my heart like this one managed.  If I have to be absolutely fair though, the main character, and essentially the narrator, was quite irritating. But I’ll speak later about the characters themselves. The theme, family, is supposedly boring but this one is extraordinary. The author does manage to create quite a twist with the special member of the Cooke family. The most thought-provoking part for me was the relationship between all the members of the family, what they expected from each other and mostly, how a little child comprehends the world in its own unique way. “In most families, there is a favorite child.”, she writes and throughout the whole novel the innocent kid in her believes that everyone loved much more her sister and that everyone blamed her for Fern's disappearance.  It is amazing how children can take all the blame on their own shoulders. Later on in her story, she is being terribly bullied and still not wanting to bother her parents: “My mother wasn’t strong enough to hear it; she would never come out of her room again if I told.” So she just endured everything. This right here is what I call pure love. Despite for that, all her other qualities were quite annoying - she was always doubting herself, never capturing the moment and later whining about it.  Her bother, on the other hand, also had his issues but I absolutely adored his unconditional love for animals. But abandoning his whole family and going against the law was too extreme. His compassion, though, was unreal and it is hard to almost impossible to find living people who share the same dedication to protecting the animal rights. 

On the whole, this book deserves my three stars because it was a light read and I genuinely enjoyed it but it is not something I would recommend to absolute book lovers. The ending was quite predictable but that is not always a negative trace – more often the important part is not why but how it is done. And in this particular case it was heart-melting as I probably have already said a million times. The actual writing though is scattered and can be rather confusing which is the main reason I don’t recommend it to everybody. Other than that, it is a lovely story that can get to the feelings of even to most stone-hearted person. 
~I.