We Love You, Charlie Freeman
Ratings6
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings6
Average rating3.3
The Freeman family--Charles, Laurel, and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie--have been invited to the Toneybee Institute in rural Massachusetts to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected for the experiment because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family. Isolated in their new, nearly all-white community not just by their race but by their strange living situation, the Freemans come undone. And when Charlotte discovers the truth about the Institute's history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past begin to invade the present.
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I wanted to like this book because it sounded like such an interesting premise but the multiple points of view (two 1st person narrators and 3rd person recounts of myriad other characters) ruined any sense of cohesion this tale might have had. At the end, I was left feeling like I had missed something because the resolution felt disjointed and abrupt, which is a shame as I found the book very readable.
Many thanks to Thomas Allen & Son for providing me with a free review copy.
I hate monkeys. Rats and mice? Adorable! Snakes? Hello there, beautiful. But monkeys? They make my skin crawl. There is nothing creepier to me than a monkey dressed up like a person. Which is a long winded way of saying I should have known better than to pick up this book. Some of the scenes in this book are so, so disturbing that I'm worried they will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Beyond that, this book does have some interesting things to say about race, sexuality, and personhood, but even setting the monkey aside, it all felt a bit disjointed? I kept expecting something to happen that would tie the threads together but it never came. There's a really beautiful scene involving a teacher in a classroom getting through to his students that I loved, but overall this book was not. for. me.
