We Are Not Ourselves

This is one of those books. You know the type. Highly praised with considerable hype. Epic and beautiful in many ways. Wonderfully rendered, but perhaps not tightly edited. We Are Not Ourselves seems to be many stories in one, and I'm not convinced this approach was in the best interest of the novel. At times, it even felt like other stories I'd read. Here it feels like Brooklyn. Here A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And here, The Corrections (of Brooklyn?). Perhaps it is a result of feeling too much like so many other stories that We Are Not Ourselves doesn't stand out to me for its own merits. It's a fine story—nothing wrong here at all save perhaps need for a tighter storyline—but it's not one that will stick with me long. In fact, ask me now for a summary of the story and I promise my response will be shorter than this review.

It took me a little while to get into it, as it's more character driven than plot driven. But beyond the heartbreaking story, Thomas explored ideas about the things we think that will make us happy, the ways we feel our time should be spent, and how much of ourselves do we owe to others.
The way all of these ideas are interwoven throughout the book is just genius. Loved it!

Great book. Very long, and has some slow parts, but overall a really great read. Misha Collins explained it best with his wife's reaction. “ “It can't be as good as you're saying.” Fifty pages in she was still skeptical and said, “I like it,” in a slightly cavalier tone, “but I think you just read it when you were in a weird mood.” 100 pages in, she disappeared into her room and began ignoring me and the children. When she finished it she found me in the kitchen. Her glasses were wet with tears. She hugged me and said, “Beautiful. So beautiful.””

Read it if you have the time, and want to be blown away.

Out of the dozens of books I have read this year, this was one of my least favorites.

About halfway through I realized I was only continuing to read it because I just knew, after all the depressing scene of the first half, that there HAD to be a positive, satisfying point to the story by the time it reached its conclusion.

There wasn't.

This was a difficult story for me to understand. No, that's not correct; it was difficult for me to understand the point of the story. The major focus, at least of the latter portion of the book, seemed to be how Eileen, and to some extent her son Connell, dealt with Ed's Alzheimer diagnosis and inevitable slide into the horror of that neurological nightmare. But by the end it felt more like “We made it through that” than “We overcame that and emerged better than we were” though there was a tiny bit of that with Connell.

They were unlikable characters in a depressing and monotonous story.

Mr. Thomas has a way with words and is able to evoke nuanced feelings with a high degree of skill and talent. I would still look forward to reading his next work because of that skill and talent. I only hope that either he or I have reached a different point by then so that I will be able to enjoy the story he tells as opposed to just admiring his ability.

Did not finish. Characters were flat and plot mundane. It was just unrelenting misery throughout the story - alcoholism, miscarriages, death, illness, bullying - and that was only the first quarter of the book! I know I am in the minority as most people loved this book - but I needed to see a glimmer of hope (or even a likeable character), and Matthew Thomas failed to deliver it.

It started out well. The plot moved me along. Our main characters are Irish immigrant parents and their daughter. The daughter is driven as a teen to rise above her drunken parents, but somehow ends up marrying a fellow with origins much like her own.

But I'd have to say I liked We Are Not Ourselves. Liked, but didn't love. It's a solid story of an Irish woman in NYC who wants more for her life than her drunken parents gave her. In spite of her dreams, she marries a man who is not ambitious and (BIG SPOILER ALERT) unfortunately develops Altzheimer's. Solid, yes, but also long. It could have (and should have, I think) been edited down to a nice three hundred page novel. But on and on it went. I was very, very tired of the storyline by the end.