“The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.” …
“In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.' ”
Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind.
Now her adored older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.
And Fern, Rosemary’s beloved sister, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief? Fern’s is a fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined.
“In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.' ”
Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind.
Now her adored older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.
And Fern, Rosemary’s beloved sister, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief? Fern’s is a fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined.
This would have been a good book to read on my kindle, instead of paperback, because there are a lot of words that I wanted to look up the definition of, and picking up my phone and googling them was more time consuming than highlighting the word on the kindle. But I felt I learnt a few things, which usually means that I am interested in the story enough to want to learn something, as opposed to escaping in to a fairytale.
And I did genuinely enjoy this story! I was a bit hesitant because the blurb on the back was quite vague, but not that I have finished I understand why it had to be that way. Without giving any detail away, the twist was a surprise to me, and I'm glad for that, because now not only did I learn something and enjoyed the story, but it took me somewhere I didn't expect, and I like that.
Initially I thought I had this story pegged as a story about how our parents really screw us up, but the further I went, I realised that it was so much more intelligent than that, and there were so many deeper layers than its face value. I think that the writing style had a lot to do with this, the beginning was the middle, the middle was the beginning and the end, while also another beginning. Confused? Don't be, it was actually really easy to follow and the characters were so normal, with all their flaws visible if you were ready to look at them.
This book made me question so much (it even made me think about becoming a vegetarian, if I wasn't so adverse to carbs) and I have a lot of respect for the author (I kept reading past the acknowledgements and they were just as important as the actual story itself I felt).
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