What makes a family? What makes just treatment of each member of a family? How do we take into consideration different capabilities and potentials? What do we mean when we say family? And possibly most importantly, how do I talk about this book without spoiling the things that are deliberately hidden until you're well into it?
The answer is, I really can't. So be aware that by going further, you're getting into spoiler territory.
The reveal happens early enough that I wouldn't normally worry that much, but when it does come out, the narrator tells you why she's hidden this part of her story for as long as it's been, so as to let you get a feel for the terrain without a batch of assumptions that might otherwise change how you hear what she has to say. And it's a convincing argument.
This is the story of Rose, a young woman who has lost both her siblings. Both are still alive, neither have been anywhere near their parents in years, and she doesn't know where either one is. She's away at college as the book starts, trying to blend in and not be noticeable, which she mostly achieves by being quiet, words having become weaponized over her life.
Her brother left voluntarily, repudiating his family and all they had been through, leaving and embracing life as a radical and eventually, fugitive. Her sister, well, the circumstances of her sister leaving were considerably murkier.
The book starts out with Rose being given her mother's journals of the time when her sister left, and losing them almost immediately. It's a metaphysical gift, since Rose is less than willing to revisit the past and her memories of it. But she finds she needs to, moving through the world and not feeling part of it in very significant ways.
Which brings us to the reveal. Her sister Fern, her twin that she was raised with from birth to age five or six, is a chimpanzee. They were brought up together, tested ad nauseam by her father's grad students, did everything together. It's not revealed till then because once you know her sister is a chimpanzee, you start to see her as less a sister, and more a pet, which the narrator doesn't want. Her brother similarly sees Fern as his sister, and prefers her to Rose for reasons that are slowly revealed.
What about her parents? They promised to bring Fern up like part of the family, but did it really mean to them what it meant to the children? Why were they able to send away one of their daughters? Why did they? Again, these are slowly revealed over the book, along with the part where the brother who left joined radical animal liberation groups, and has been trying to free Fern from the facility she's been in since she left their family.
So it's a novel about family, but it's also largely a story about how Rose fits into human society. Raised with Fern as her sister, she had picked up traits that are more common to chimpanzees. By her early twenties, she's mostly been able to suppress from being visible to the naked eye. It's a story about how malleable she was as a human child, how much she was shaped by her early life.
It's a story of betrayal, family, identity, and in the end, it felt like Rose ended up trying to do what she could for her sister, but in the context of seeing her sister as a different species with different needs, which means she comes to a different answer than her brother. I'm not sure I loved the end, or that other possibilities were well explored. It's unsettling, at times, the distancing from Fern, even if we understand why Rose has coped that way, hard not to extrapolate it to families with human members with different needs, and the historical drive to institutionalize. I'd need to think more on this to develop the idea fully, but that's where I am at the moment.
I'm not sure if I liked the book or not. It was very readable, and I wasn't bothered all the way through, it was more in reflection after I was finished that it started to make me uneasy. I'll have to keep thinking about it.
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