Hoover is a master at writing scenes from dual perspectives.

Sydney and Ridge make beautiful music together in a love triangle written by Hoover ( Losing Hope, 2013, etc.), with a link to a digital soundtrack by American Idol contestant Griffin Peterson. 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.Ī fantastic novel: technically and intellectually complex, while emotionally gripping. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

In 1996, she is a troubled student at U.C. Rosemary recounts her family history at first haltingly and then with increasingly articulate passion. 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.

We are completely beside ourselves