We’ll leave that there.īack to the meeting in the university canteen. It’s a hard book to review without giving spoilers, but the discomfort lies in the fact that it’s now 2021 and there are articles in our media on how the Covid vaccinations are being tested. But then our narrator mentions her sister, Fern, and it all came flooding back and made me very uncomfortable all over again. A couple of girls in a canteen meeting and becoming friends. I read it when it first came out in 2013 and it took a while to recognise it because the title sounds too frivolous for the book it becomes, and the story starts on a bit of a side note.
While this deception eats away at Rosemary, she's also haunted by a sense of culpability for her role in Fern's dismissal from the family.Second time round for this book. When she was 5, Rosemary was told Fern went to live on a farm, which is no more true than the stories most parents tell children about a lost pet. But her novel hinges upon Rosemary's sharp voice, which at its best includes funny, self-aware asides such as an early reference to a character at a holiday dinner where she flippantly advises the reader, "Don't get attached to him he's not really part of this story." Fowler takes her time revealing that rather key detail in a way even Rosemary describes as "irritatingly coy," but the choice points toward her hazy feelings about her family that slowly come to a boil as the novel continues.įowler makes reference to multiple studies in cross-fostering chimps with human families, including psychology researcher Maurice Temerlin's experience raising a chimp as a human infant in the 1970s. The loss of both children has left the Cooke family shattered, particularly with regard to Fern - who happens to be a chimpanzee. Her father drinks too much, her estranged older brother, Lowell, is an animal rights activist who ran away as a teenager, and her sister, Fern, was removed from the family when Rosie was only 5. Telling her story from the safe distance of her early 40s in 2012, Rosemary is the daughter of two scientists who grew up in what seems a typical if emotionally repressed Midwestern family (at least from a modern literary standpoint). At the center of Fowler's story is Rosemary Cooke, who narrates with a bit of a barbed edge while looking at her past, first as a precocious toddler and most prominently as a troubled, introverted twentysomething at University of California, Davis, in 1996.
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