Note: I received a copy of We Love You Charlie Freeman from the publisher for review consideration.
You know what there aren’t enough of, team? Books about chimp language research. I would read one a day on all the days if that were a possible thing, ever since I listened to the Lucy episode of RadioLab in 2010. And I lovety-love-loved a book that it’s a spoiler to tell you is about chimp language research even though that’s the only reason why I read it in the first place (don’t click the link if you are uptight about spoilers), and what with one thing and another, me and chimp language research books are truly the greatest of pals. When I heard that Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel, We Love You Charlie Freeman, was a book about chimp language research plus the American history of scientific racism, I pretty much died of joy.
In the 1990s, Charlotte Freeman and her family have come to the Toneybee Institute to teach Charlie the chimpanzee how to sign. They are to take Charlie in as a member of their family, immerse him in ASL and affection, and report the results to Toneybee. But the institute’s motive for selecting a black family for this job may not have been altogether pure, as Charlotte begins to discover its history of institutionalized racism (and shoddy science).
(If you’re clapping your hands reading that description, you are approximating my reaction when I first learned about this book.)
There’s so much to explore in a book with this premise, from the ethics of scientific experiments on animals to the wavery line that divides us from them to the history of using science to dehumanize people of color to the way families relate to each other. All of these things fascinate me, and appear to fascinate the author, too. Disappointingly, although she picks up all of these awesome ideas and tosses them into the air at the book’s beginning, she then doesn’t have fast enough reflexes (or enough hands? I don’t know, y’all, I’m not sure why I started this juggling metaphor anyway) to stick the landing (it doesn’t count as mixing metaphors if both of them are circus-related) (shut up) (nobody asked you).
With that said, Greenidge’s writing is funny and lucid, and I wanted to follow her on every one of the roads this book started to walk down. It’s just that none of them really seemed to go anywhere. But as first novel problems go, leaving the reader wanting more of all your ideas is a pretty good one to have. I’ll be following the author’s continued career with much interest.