This was definitely a unique book. It was easy to read and I finished it quickly. It was an enjoyable distraction and with a fun twist.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler has been on my TBR since before it came out. I think I’d call this literary fiction rather than specific. TW for primates in labs. It’s about families, and how we think about families, and also about animals and how humans relate to them, how we treat each other, and what that says about us both. I was especially struck by the themes intersecting with my thoughts about the current American healthcare debate between those who think it’s about money and those who think it’s about people.

If you know of Karen Joy Fowler, it’s likely to be for her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club. In tenor that book and this one could hardly be more different. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (first published in 2013), though told with humour by a confiding first-person narrator, is a much weightier book, with themes of family breakdown, animal experimentation and rights, and dealing with grief and regret.

Rosemary is for remembrance, and this novel is presented entirely through Rosemary Cooke’s memories of her peculiar upbringing in Bloomington, Indiana. You see, until the age of five, she was raised as part of a twinning experiment alongside a female chimpanzee named Fern. Her psychologist father and his small horde of graduate students would compare child and chimp to contribute to the general body of knowledge about primate development.

However, readers don’t learn that Fern is a chimpanzee until page 77. This is meant as a great narrative surprise; one is supposed to have believed wholeheartedly until that point that she was a normal, human sibling – Rosemary only ever calls her “my sister.” (The most obvious clue, for literature buffs, would be the epigraphs from Franz Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy,” which has an ape narrator.)

For a book to rely so heavily on a twist is risky, especially because many will already know the book’s subject matter. I had heard about it somehow, even though the dozens of rave reviews excerpted in the paperback all coyly avoid saying exactly what the book is about. It’s about “what constitutes a family” (Daily Mail) or “what makes human beings human” (Readers Digest) – but nearly every reviewer tries desperately not to uncover the twist. I’ve chosen to talk about it here in part to vent my frustration about what feels like a narrative trick, and also because it’s impossible to discuss the book in any depth without revealing it.

So Fowler’s book turns on a twist, which also necessitates a slightly unorthodox structure. She’ll begin in the middle, Rosemary declares, dropping us into California in 1996, when she was an aimless fifth-year college student with an unpredictable friend named Harlow who steals an antique puppet. Here, in the middle of things, we learn that Rosemary had a sister named Fern who was taken away when she was five; she also has a brother named Lowell who opted out of the Cooke family. Later we learn he is a protestor with Animal Liberation Front, now wanted by the FBI for property damage. He spent the years since Fern left tracking her down and releasing other intelligent animals from their cages.

Looping back in time to disclose why Fern was sent away and where she is now, Rosemary is distressed by how people take advantage of animals, especially primates. Animal rights is no doubt an important topic, but Fowler’s treatment of it smacks of emotional manipulation. “I didn’t want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones,” Rosemary asserts. “The world runs on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery,” Lowell proclaims.

“The Davis primate centre is today credited with significant advances in…Alzheimer’s, autism, and Parkinson’s. Nobody’s arguing these issues are easy.” Yet the novel tends to avoid such complexities. Had Fowler wished to give a balanced, multifaceted view of the issue, she might have used multiple narrators or an omniscient third-person one. Rosemary’s father is given especially short shrift. Two other novels with chimps as main characters, Unsaid by Neil Abramson and A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam (which has occasional chimp narration) are more profound and less agenda-driven; while one of the better books I’ve read about overall animal ethics is Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

My other major problem with the book is Rosemary’s narration. So many have remarked on how sharp and clever it is, but I found it coy and unpleasantly sarcastic. As I was reading, I marked passages I liked with green Post-it flags and ones I didn’t care for with red; in the end, red outnumbered green two to one. As an example of the faux-conspiratorial tone I so objected to: “Let’s simplify matters and just agree that, at this point in my story, my whole family…was really really really upset.” The downside of being trapped in a narrator’s mind is that we don’t know if we’re seeing all the other characters clearly. I also wished there had been much more of Fern. (“But you’d probably rather get straight to Fern. I’ll condense,” Rosemary once promises.) Too much of the story is emotional aftermath rather than action.

I seem to be a lone dissenting voice in the sea of praise for this novel. It is a quick, compelling read, but compared to other books on the subject, and even to other family stories generally, I thought it was light and even silly in places. Others will love it, I’m sure, and it will foster plenty of debate as a book club selection. Still, it is quite a shock to see this included on the 2014 Booker Prize longlist; in my opinion, it does not belong there.