Summary
Rosemary Cooke, who tells this story, is twenty two and a student at the University of California, Davis, in 1996. When she was a talkative child her father, a psychology professor at Indiana University, used to tell her, "Skip the beginning. Start in the middle," and she takes his advice: the novel opens after she has been arrested on campus following a scene in the cafeteria involving Harlow, a volatile young woman she has just met. Her older brother, Lowell, ran away years ago and is wanted by the FBI. Her sister, Fern, vanished from the family when Rosemary was five, and nobody at home has spoken about her since.
About a quarter of the way in, Rosemary tells the reader what she has been holding back, and it is the fact the rest of the book turns on, so readers who want to meet it unwarned should stop here. Fern is a chimpanzee. Rosemary and Fern were raised together almost from birth as twin sisters, the subjects of their father's psychology experiment, until Fern was sent away to a laboratory. Rosemary explains the delay herself: "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister." The family never recovered. Her mother broke down, and Lowell, learning that Fern was kept in poor conditions at a facility in South Dakota, became an animal rights activist. In Davis, Harlow and Ezra, the manager of Rosemary's building, break into the university's primate center to free the monkeys; years later Lowell, long a fugitive, is caught. By the end Rosemary has become a kindergarten teacher, her mother volunteers at Fern's facility, and Rosemary is at last reunited with her sister.
The book is funny, fast and conversational, and very sad underneath. Kirkus found occasional passages that preach about animal experiments, but found Rosemary's voice "vulnerable, angry, shockingly honest" and called the whole "a fantastic novel." Maureen Corrigan on NPR called it "smart and exquisitely sad," adding that she had warned sensitive animal lovers away from it. It suits book clubs, readers of family novels, and anyone curious about what we owe the animals we study.
Historical Context & Significance
The novel won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, chosen by the judges Madison Smartt Bell, Manuel Muñoz and Achy Obejas, and was honored at the Folger Shakespeare Library on May 10, 2014. The finalists were Daniel Alarcón's At Night We Walk in Circles, Percival Everett's Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Joan Silber's Fools and Valerie Trueblood's Search Party: Stories of Rescue. Fowler had been a finalist before, in 2002, with Sister Noon; Silber went on to win in 2018 with Improvement. The foundation's account of the ceremony quoted Barbara Kingsolver in the New York Times, who found the novel "so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart."
The book then crossed into other prizes' territory. It was on the shortlist for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, the first year the prize was open to American novels, which went to Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and it was a Nebula nominee for best novel of 2013, the award Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice won. Fowler, born in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1950, was known for The Jane Austen Book Club (2004); her next novel, Booth, appeared in 2022.
Where to get it
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