Carla Jean Whitley

Rosemary Cooke is, in many ways, an ordinary girl raised in an ordinary family. Her father is a behavioral psychologist who always brings his work home, and her mother is his supportive better half. As the youngest, Rose admires her older brother, Lowell, and is jealous because she thinks he loves her sister, Fern, the most. In fact, Rose thinks everyone would pay more attention to her if Fern weren’t around.

But that’s where the Cookes are different from most families. Rose and Fern are their father’s work: Fern is a chimp, being raised as a daughter in a human family.

In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, author Karen Joy Fowler (Wit’s End, The Jane Austen Book Club) offers a masterful account of a woman unraveling a tangle of family history, memory and the complex emotions that arise from the way she was raised.

As a girl, Rose’s identity was forged against her will, leaving her marked as “monkey girl”—like most siblings, Rose’s movements and attitudes mimicked her sister’s. Rose wanted to know life without Fern.

And then she did. One summer, Rose was sent to her grandparents’ house while the family moved. When she returned home, Fern had been sent away for good. And Rose quickly discovered life wasn’t as she had expected it would be. “If I’d ever imagined I’d be more important without her constantly distracting everyone, I found quite the opposite,” she says. Years later, Rose is left to explore the balance between memory and fiction. Are her recollections of her sister’s departure and the days preceding it accurate, or has she repressed some events and adjusted those memories with time? Could her parents be trusted after promising to love Fern and Rose just the same, but giving Fern away? Why was her sister forced to leave?

Fowler’s extensive research into chimp behavioral studies and her understanding of psychology (like her character’s dad, Fowler’s own father was a behavioral psychologist) show up throughout this thoughtful novel. In the end, readers are left to ponder with Rose perhaps the most important question raised: What makes us human, anyway?

Elm Howells led a charmed life. As a member of the Tinsley family, she found use for her art history degree through employment at the family’s prestigious New York City auction house. She also found joy outside of work: Elm and her husband, Colin, were the parents of son Ronan and daughter Moira. But her life was forever changed during a 2004 vacation to Thailand, when Ronan was swept away by a tsunami. In the years since, his death has colored everything in Elm’s life, including the decisions she makes at work.

Meanwhile, Spanish-born painter Gabriel Connois is trying to make a name for himself in Paris’ art scene. His adopted last name is already a success, thanks to his distant ancestor Marcel Connois. Gabriel has taken steps to prove his talent as well: He financed his Parisian art education by forging a Connois painting that belonged to his mother so he could replace it, and then sell the original. When an art dealer approaches Gabriel to paint a number of works “in the style of” famed artists, the money and the opportunity are too good to pass up.

Elm is desperate to reduce the pain caused by her son’s death. Gabriel is determined to get his shot at artistic success, no matter the cost. In Allison Amend’s A Nearly Perfect Copy, the lives of these art connoisseurs run along parallel, and sometimes intersecting, paths as Elm and Gabriel go to extremes in their work and personal lives.

Amend’s talent is on full display as these smart, complex narratives dance around each other, each capturing the reader’s imagination without ever detracting from the other story. Although she’s received critical acclaim for her work in a number of literary publications and for her historical novel, Stations West, this finely rendered portrait of two lives should introduce Amend to a wider audience.

Tia, Caroline and Juliette live in various neighborhoods and suburbs of Boston, but their worlds are farther apart than the miles would suggest. Tia works every day to rise above the hardscrabble circumstances of her youth. She’s a 20-something orphan, a single woman who is looking for a person to call her own.

Caroline is a pathologist who is deeply in love with both her work and her husband. She struggles, though, to feel at home in their sprawling, sterile McMansion and in her role as an adoptive mother to the couple’s daughter, Savannah.

Juliette seems to have it all: a thriving business, two smart sons and an attractive, loving husband. And then she stumbles upon a secret that her husband, Nathan, has hidden for years—one that connects these three very different women in surprising ways.

In The Comfort of Lies, the latest effort by best-selling author Randy Susan Meyers (The Murderer’s Daughters), hiding the truth proves no comfort at all. Meyers offers plenty of insight into each woman’s psyche as they struggle to untangle the web that has brought them together. By facing the realities of their lives and relationships, Tia, Juliette and Caroline come to terms with their challenges. Meyers’ carefully told story is a satisfying examination of the imperfect paths we all walk.

The Rovaniemis are an unusual family. That’s obvious at first glance; modern-day American families rarely include nine children. But the family’s membership in an incredibly conservative branch of the Lutheran church makes it clear that they’re to be in the world, but not of it. They aren’t allowed to listen to music with a beat, though the children each play orchestral instruments. Dancing is forbidden. Movies are off limits.

So the children walk a fine line as they try to fit in at school and at work while respecting their church’s rules—or, in the case of three of the Rovaniemis, as they attempt to leave the church’s influence behind. The eldest, Brita, follows in the family’s footsteps as she gives birth to seven children. Others rebel as they leave for college, but later settle into a church-approved life. Paula deals with the difficulty of being the awkward daughter among beauties. The younger children face the burden of their older siblings’ choices, and sometimes find themselves lost in a family of so many.

A compelling first novel explores how extreme faith is challenged by the modern world.

In We Sinners, author Hanna Pylväinen’s debut novel, a different, distinctive Rovaniemi voice takes the lead in each chapter, creating a novel that reads almost like a series of connected short stories. These powerful vignettes reveal the faith’s influence on the family’s relationships. Pylväinen’s own background—she grew up in, and left, just such a church—lends an expert voice to each character’s compelling perspective. The children who leave the church realize that freedom comes at a price, and those who remain face the constraints their faith places on relationships. But despite the family’s differing views on faith and life, they are brought together through shared blood and experience.

Pylväinen’s straightforward but gripping storytelling and fully developed characters make it clear that this new voice in literature is one to watch.

Sunny Mann seems to lead a perfect life. She's married to her childhood sweetheart, who has become wealthy thanks to immense success in his field. But his field is robotics, and sometimes Maxon has trouble distinguishing his human emotions from a robot's machinations. Maxon knows he loves, regrets and forgives, but he finds it difficult to understand why he is different from his beloved robots. 

And Sunny has trouble accepting that. She's playing the role of the perfect housewife, caring for the couple's autistic son, Bubber, while putting on her best smile for their wealthy neighbors, even while Maxon is on a mission to populate the moon with the robots he's constructed. Everything looks Stepford-perfect—that is, until Sunny's in a car wreck and her perfectly coifed blonde 'do flies off, revealing her completely bald head. 

It's just one of many idiosyncratic twists in Shine Shine Shine, an amusing and unpredictable novel from book doctor Lydia Netzer. Netzer has spent her career fixing others' manuscripts, and with this first major publisher effort she proves a creative force in her own right. 

On a rocket bound for the moon, Maxon reckons with his humanity as compared to the perfectly structured machines he adores. But his love for Sunny reminds him that he is, in fact, human. Meanwhile, Sunny is left earthbound, pregnant with the couple's second child and, after the wreck, suddenly determined to unmask herself and reveal her imperfections for all to see. 

As they face challenges without the lifelong support system they've provided each other, Sunny and Maxon must confront the realities of loving flawed beings. Ultimately, Shine Shine Shine is a story about the nature of love—and a lovable, quirky novel from a new voice in fiction.