We are all Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Rosemary is our narrator.  She begins the story of her unusual family from the middle when she is a student at UC Davis.  She left her academic family in Indiana because she hoped to reconnect with an older brother who many years earlier had abandoned his family for a life as a domestic terrorist opposing the cruel scientific treatment of animals.  But at the center of the story as it unfolds both backward and forward is Fern, Rosemary's "sister".  Certain copies of this book give away the reality of Fern but mine did not and I thought my reading was the better for it so I will not tell you here.  There is much to be said about family in the story, about memory and about what it means to be uniquely human.  It kinda sticks in your mind...can that happen in any other creature?