I wanted to like The Lost Girl more than I liked it. I was interested in the premise, which reminded me of Never Let Me Go (it’s not a spoiler! Ishiguro’s not hiding it!), and I wish I did not have to make all the following criticisms of it:

• I didn’t buy the romance. They went to a zoo one time, and? Apart from the fact that Sean is literally the only guy her age that Eva has ever met, I couldn’t tell why these two characters were supposed to be in so much looooove. It wasn’t insta-love, but it was still not set up well.
• The resolution of the story — which I won’t go into — felt like it happened because the book needed to end, not because it made sense organically to what had happened already. How is Eva different from all the other echoes that the rules would bend this way for her? Not made clear to me. (Is it just that she has a very strong sense of self???)
• (spoilers here) Eva’s furious forever with Amarra’s ex-boyfriend for telling the Hunters where to find her, but she does not seem to have the same level of wrath for Amarra’s parents, who sign a Sleep Order which is killing her. Eva never says, I am a person, and if you sign this order, that is the same as killing me to them. Nobody does! Shouldn’t someone yell at them about that? Sean or someone?

Oh well. Win some, lose some.

Cover report: American cover by a lot. The British one is ever so generic.

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26a is about a family of four girls, daughters of a British father and a Nigerian mother, who live in a shabby bit of London. The oldest is Bel, Mystic Bel, who has true dreams; then come the twins, Bessi and Georgia, who do everything together; and finally the youngest, little Kemy. The book follows mainly Bessi and Georgia from the time they are seven (when their hamster dies, and they stop eating ham in tribute) into their increasingly (for Georgia) difficult and troubled adulthoods.

As a rule, I don’t enjoy these sorts of family-difficulties novels, but 26a won me over in a few different ways: first by Evans’s generosity with her characters, and then with her absolutely lovely writing. If perhaps she is overfond of metaphory poeticalness, she more than makes up for it in the way she talks about happiness and sadness, and about depression particularly.

I’m at work next to the filing cabinet and I’ve been thinking about happiness. Does it mean bouncing about and smiling a lot or is it that charge in the heart and wanting to cry? Does it stay always? . . . Because I’m beginning to think that happiness is a sensation, or a visitation, not a way of being. It goes up and down up and down it goes and sometimes there are bruises.

Y’all, that line happiness is a visitation hit me like a ton of bricks. That is a good line. Elsewhere, Georgia speaks about the kind of happiness you work at achieving — Georgia has to, anyway. Her twin sister, Bessi, does not have the same shadow in her that Georgia has, and happiness seems to come to her naturally.

She felt that nothing would ever hurt now, and that she might, after all, have the capacity for non-DIY happiness, the type of happiness that came by itself and could not be learnt from sources like [self-help books].

Or there’s this that Georgia’s therapist says:

Georgia sat back in her chair and her heels lifted off the floor. She said, “But how will I stop it from multiplying? How can I make it die?”

 

Katya told her it might never die, but with acceptance and good management it could be eased. “It is an endurance,” she said (endurance was a word Katya used a lot). “You overcome and chase it away, and you must be determined. You smash it to the floor. And if it is necessary you scream and tell it, I do not consent.“

Diana Evans writes about depression, basically, in much the way that depression feels (or has felt) to me. For instance, Georgia comes up with drills that she can run for when the days become bad, which again, damn, that sort of thinking has been so useful to me. (I called it protocols, but the notion was the same.)

Spoilers to follow in this paragraph: If I had known going in what was going to happen at the end, I wouldn’t have read this book. Fond as I am of my own sisters, I do not deal well with stories in which people lose their own sisters. I have been known to abandon books at rest stops in Georgia when it became clear that one of the sisters in the book was going to die. 26a is particularly sad because it’s someone losing her twin sister; and because Diana Evans herself lost a twin sister to suicide.

26a is a sad, specific book. If you are not into this type of book (which I am not), its goodness depends on the specifics’ resonating with you. I can imagine it feeling sort of mystical airy-fairy if not. But for me, this was an excellent read by a first-time author, and I’m excited to read more by Diana Evans.

Do you have any authors whose books are not exactly your thing genre-wise, but their writing makes you love them anyway?

Cover report: Again, I’m unhappy with this on both sides. The American cover is more pleasing to look upon, yet it is generic. The British cover would not cause me to pick it up in a bookstore, but I like how the cover picks up the image of the wallpaper in Bessi and Georgia’s room, and I like how it’s cracked and peeling. My instinct was American cover, and I’m keeping it there because that’s what I did with The Village. Okay. American. By a hair. And I’m not happy with either one.

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The People in the Trees admittedly hits a lot of sweet spots for me: a well-imagined fictional world (the science and the places in this book are all imaginary); an audacious premise (a Micronesian tribe seems to have attained something like immortality, though at a terrible cost) treated with utmost seriousness; an unreliable narrator (Norton Perina, the scientist who discovered and published on this immortality phenomenon, is writing his memoirs); an abundance of footnotes (by a staunch admirer of Perina, also an unreliable narrator, who is editing the memoirs); and a grand profusion of ethical questions.

Perina, who is loosely based on Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, is writing his memoirs from a jail cell, where he is serving a two year sentence on charges of sexually assaulting one of his adopted Micronesian children. Before his disgrace, he was one of the most renowned and respected scientists in America for his discovery of Selene syndrome: a condition, apparently occasioned by the consumption of a particular kind of meat indigenous to the Micronesian island of Ivu’ivu, in which human lifespans are extended to as much as six times their natural length, while mental capacity becomes more and more diminished.

It’s quickly, though not crudely, obvious that Perina is a nasty piece of work, a man who simply doesn’t bother himself much about anyone around him. He’s not trying to justify himself because he’s loftily serene in his righteousness. He speaks of having regrets, yet says that he wouldn’t — couldn’t — have done anything differently. The discovery of Selene syndrome, as you might expect, has massive environmental and social consequences for Ivu’ivu, as hordes of Western scientists and pharmaceutical companies (and eventually missionaries) descend on the island. In his later years, Perina begins to bring home abandoned Ivu’ivuan children, hordes of them, a total of 43 — including Victor, whose accusations of sexual assault lead to Perina’s eventual fall from grace.

What can I say about The People in the Trees? It is a book with presence. From the first few pages it forces you to sit up and take notice. I think the last time I read a debut novel with this level of assurance and originality was Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Comparisons will inevitably be made to Nabokov, both to Lolita and to Pale Fire, and as high as compliment as that is to The People in the Trees, it’s a not-inconsiderable compliment to Nabokov as well.

This book right here, you guys, it rocked me like a southbound train. Three days after reading it, I still haven’t been able to read anything new. I just want to sit with The People in the Trees and think about it and reread parts of it and talk about it to everyone. (Seriously. Ask my friends-and-relations. I have not been able to shut up about this book.)

Okay! In descending order of how certain I feel that y’all will love it: Eva, Vasilly, Proper Jenny and Teresa, Aarti, and Ana, you should read this book please. It’s all about like colonization and guilt and appropriation and ethics and science! Read it, read it! (Jill, I just am not sure. I can see you loving this, but I can also see you really, really, super hating it. Use your judgment, I guess?)

Cover report: Between the US and UK paperback covers, I’d easily choose the US one. But the UK only published the book in paperback. Between the UK paperback cover and the US hardback cover, I’d choose the UK, I guess? Because turtle? I’m calling it for America because of the three available covers, I like the American paperback by far the best.

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The beginning: British police detective Emmanuel Cooper comes to investigate the murder of an Afrikaner police captain in the small town of Jacob’s Rest. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a murder mystery where the victim is male. This probably happens more often than it seems to me to happen. I don’t read that many murder mysteries, partly because it always seems to be women getting killed, and I get tired of reading about beautiful lady corpses. I can read about alive ladies doing things that alive people do.

When Aarti reviewed A Beautiful Place to Die recently, I was excited to read a murder mystery by a non-American-or-British author and set in a non-American-or-British place, and as I’ve said, a murder mystery featuring a male corpse. From the get-go, it was clear that the book was going to be a nuanced exploration of racial and gender prejudice, and I was excited for it.

The end (spoilers here, but not spoilers about who did the murder because that is actually the least interesting part of this book and that’s not a criticism): If I had to choose, I’d always go with the I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here today style of ending. I got anxious reading the ending of A Beautiful Place to Die, which gets pretty violent. Since the book is really about prejudice, the violence that simmers throughout the book rarely has to do with the murderer’s identity, and nearly always has to do with preserving one idea of what people and society are like and how they are supposed to behave.

The whole: My favorite thing about A Beautiful Place to Die is also my least favorite thing about it. Malla Nunn is absolutely wonderful at depicting life in a society that not only condones but (openly) institutionalizes racism. The down side of this is that racial violence is very, very hard for me to read about in fiction. The final third of the book features a healthy dose of race-based violence, as well as (threats of) sexual violence, and if I am going to read about that, I would prefer to read about it in nonfiction.

The up side is that it’s amazing to watch Malla Nunn pick apart the assumptions, large and small, that go into creating a racist society. That she does this while writing from the perspective of a white British man is even more impressive–wonderfully, you can see Emmanuel Cooper being forced to confront his own privilege as he struggles to solve the murder of Captain Willem Pretorius:

She made a sound of disbelief low in her throat. “Only a white man would ask a question like that and expect an answer.”

Emmanuel felt like he was seeing her for the first time. The meek coloured girl he could deal with, even ignore, but this furious sharp-eyed woman was something else altogether.

“What’s the question got to do with my being white?”

“Only white people talk about choice like it’s a box of chocolates that everyone gets to pick from. [A white man] walks into this room and I say what to him? ‘No, thank you, sir, but I do not wish to spoil my chances for a good marriage with a good man from my community, so please ma’ baas take yourself back to your wife and family. I promise not to blackmail you if you promise not to punish my family for turning you away. Thank you for asking me. I am honored.’ Tell me, is that how it works for nonwhite women in Jo’burg, Detective?”

What’s particularly good is that discussions like these come up regardless of Cooper’s good intentions. Although he opposes apartheid and even has some personal experience of racial prejudice (his whiteness, the book suggests early on, may be more fragile than it seems), he’s still able to benefit by it, both in the issues he has to worry about day to day, and in the power he has over any black resident of Jacob’s Rest.

When I said, above, that the identity of the murderer was the least interesting aspect of the book, I didn’t mean to imply that the mystery is a bad one. It isn’t. But the book isn’t exactly about trying to solve a murder. It’s about how it would be to try to solve the murder of an upstanding white citizen in a small racist town where certain paths of investigation are acceptable and others are unacceptable, and you can tell which path is which by the skin color of the people being investigated. Malla Nunn does this spectacularly well, and despite bits of her book being quite upsetting to read, I’m looking forward to reading the next two books in this series.

Cover report: American cover wins. I didn’t choose this one. Both covers were boring to me, so I had Randon choose. He says neither draws him, but he thinks the American cover is better than the British cover.

affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository

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The beginning: The first chapter of Half Blood Blues won me over completely. One of my favorite books, Sunshine, begins with the line, It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn’t that dumb, and although that is not an eloquent description of a phenomenon that worries me greatly, it is an exact description of it. You just never know when you will make a choice that you think is a little dumb, a little risky, and that choice that you thought was going to be nothing (the way most of your choices are every day!) will turn out to be the whole ballgame.

That’s how Half-Blood Blues starts. A hungover half-black trumpeter called Hiero, living in occupied Paris, has finished a discouraging recording session and he wants some milk. He and our narrator, Sid Griffiths, go across town to get some milk at the only store that’s open at that hour. Sid goes into the back to be sick, and while he’s back there, the Nazis come in, and Hiero doesn’t have his papers, and he’s taken away.

From there, the book tells the story of Sid and Hiero and their band, and how they got to occupied Paris, and what happened that three of their original number were missing. In the present day (well, 1992), it tells the story of a now-old Sid, who goes to Berlin with another surviving band member, Chip, to watch a documentary about Hiero for which they provided interviews.

The end (spoilers in this section only, so skip it if you don’t want to know!): Esi Edugyan must know my heart, because the end is the same as the beginning. In the end, we discover that Sid, desperate to make this recording that he knew was going to be something special because Hiero was something special, took delivery of Hiero’s papers (including a visa to get him into Switzerland), but hid them. He thought, “We just need a few hours, just one good goddamn take.” In the present day, he admits this to Chip and to Hiero (oh, Hiero’s alive, by the way; you find that out a few chapters in), and Hiero doesn’t forgive him but he doesn’t not forgive him.

The whole: Half Blood Blues is a book about music more than it is a book about World War II. That said, when Edugyan takes the time to evoke the setting, she does a marvelous job of exploring the strange, uncertain status of black Germans and black non-Germans in the early years of the Second World War. Where Chip and Sid can walk relatively freely in Germany and France, as Americans, Hiero is liable at any moment to be taken by the Nazis, charged with a crime he did not commit, and sent to a concentration camp.

While the central conflict of the book is the question of whether Sid had a hand in Hiero’s capture, Edugyan creates suspense wonderfully by starting her 1942 story at the end. The reader knows from the start that Hiero will be taken, and that only four people remain to make a very important recording, and that one version of an important recording will be kept. When the book returns us to the weeks leading up to the recording and Hiero’s capture, there are six band members and no particular mention of recording a track. The importance of the song is tangled up with the band’s attrition and the ever-growing power of the Nazi regime. It’s wonderfully done.

Cover report: I like the record on the American cover, with the Nazi insignia above it; really, this is a book about music, not a book about war. The British cover is a generic war/Paris/nostalgia sort of book cover. American cover wins.

affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository

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The end (spoilers in this section only; highlight ’em if you want ’em): I predicted this correctly in my brain. I am not familiar with the story of the Crane Wife, but I feel like anyone who has ever read a fairy tale knew what was going to happen in the end of this story. Kumiko leaves/dies. The end does not specifically say so, but I am confident that this occurs as a result of George’s not being able to control his curiosity about her life apart from him.

The whole: First, a word about fairy tales. I have to tell you that I just absolutely love fairy tales. I love them so much. I love them to infinity. I love their unflinching rules. I love when the decisions of the magic in fairy tales are final, and I love when there are second chances. I love how people keep releasing new retellings of their favorite stories with beautiful, evocative illustrations in watercolor or woodcuts or pen and ink. But mainly I love how totally insane they are:

Not far off [the sausage] met with a dog on the road, who looking upon the sausage as lawful prey, had picked him up, and made an end of him. The bird then lodged a complaint against the dog as an open and flagrant robber, but it was all no good, as the dog declared that he had found forged letters upon the sausage, so that he deserved to lose his life.

Sure. Sometimes that’s the way it goes for a sentient sausage. Later in the story the mouse tries to use its body to stir the soup, the way the sausage always did, and it boils alive; and the bird drowns while trying to get water from the well. This is a real story from Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

The story of the Crane Wife, from Japan, has the man marrying the crane woman, and she makes very beautiful clothes, so beautiful that they sell for a lot of money and make the man and the crane women wealthy. The crane woman does all this on the condition that the man will never, ever come to watch her while she makes the clothes. But his curiosity (of course) gets the best of him, and he peeks in at her while she’s working. There he sees her transformed again into a crane and pulling out her own feathers to weave into the clothes. When she catches him looking, she flies away. (Cf. East of the Sun, West of the Moon; and the story of Cupid and Psyche; among many others.)

If I had a problem with The Crane Wife, it would be that Patrick Ness does not always quite succeed in blending the logic that fairy tales have (and her creations were so beautiful that every one who saw them fell into a sickness of yearning for them type thing)–which, again, I love and am perfectly willing to accept as part of a story–with the real-life elements. In some areas this does work. The sudden wild success of Kumiko’s tiles feels magical in the way fairy tale riches do, and George’s curiosity and desperation to know her is beautifully set up and played out.

The story works less well when dealing with George’s daughter, Amanda, and her life as a lonely single mother. It feels like Amanda’s part of a separate world, and for a while that was okay. Her story–encounters with the ex who dumped her, struggles to make friends with the unfriendly women at work, worrying about her kid–reminds you that even if George is living halfway in a fairy tale, everyone around him has to be part of the real world. But when Amanda’s story overlaps with Kumiko and gets a little more mystical and fairy-tale-ish, it feels contrived.

Have y’all read this yet? Any thoughts on what makes it not quite work? Or if you think it does work, any thoughts on why I’m wrong?

Cover report: American cover wins by a lot. Admittedly I am a sucker for art with houses in it, but even setting that aside, I just think the American cover is more visually interesting. I’d pick up the book based on the American cover, and I wouldn’t based on the British cover.

Note: I received this ebook from the publisher via Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

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I am not exactly disillusioned with Janet Malcolm, but I’m not not disillusioned with her. Her writing remains as beautifully clear and elegant as I ever thought it was. She is still the person I turn to when David Foster Wallace has worn me down with his ceaseless locutions. Lo:

Human nature is such that when we are suddenly taken up by someone whom we consider superior and admirable, we accept his attentions calmly, whereas when we are dropped we cannot rest until we feel we have got to the bottom of the person’s profound irrationality. Nor can we easily accept the verdict sent down to us through the mortifying silence of someone who has found us wanting and has packed up and moved on. We protest it, each in our way — our futile ways, since the more effective is our protest the more surely do we drive away the person whose love we have lost not because of anything we did, but because of who we are.

Good, right?

On the down side, I am finding that Malcolm’s acknowledgement of the ethical problems posed by journalism does not inoculate her against those problems. Whereas the controversies she covers in her literary biographies remain interesting and relevant — we won’t stop caring about what sort of person Sylvia Plath was, or about the inherent problems of someone like Bronwyn Hughes controlling Plath’s letters and estate — something like In the Freud Archives feels pointlessly petty and gossipy. Viz.:

[Jeffrey Masson said,] “Wendy [O’Flaherty] was even worse, in her way, though I thought, Well, at least she’s a woman. I remember once trying to touch her, and she looked at me and said, ‘Frankly, I don’t think you’re man enough to have an affair with me.’ I ran into this sort of thing everywhere I went at Harvard.

and much later in the book:

[Wendy O’Flaherty said,] “I gather from other people that [Masson’s] not nice to anybody, but he certainly has always been beastly to me. I wouldn’t sleep with Jeff, and he might have regarded that as a kind of gauntlet.”

This sort of thing feels like a waste of Janet Malcolm’s — or anyone’s — time. So much of In the Freud Archives — and this was true of The Crime of Sheila McGough and The Journalist and the Murderer as well — is spent in quoting long, complicatedly self-justifying speeches from people who feel they have been dreadfully wronged. Malcolm cycles through various interviewees and their feelings of having been wronged — Jeffrey Masson, denied curatorship of the Freud Archives following an ill-advised Times article; Kurt Eissler, who comes off rather sweet actually in his Freud apologetics; Peter Swales, also taken under Eissler’s wing and later abandoned when he proved to be insufficiently fond of Freud.

And, just, why bother? Most of the people you meet in the world could probably be drawn on to talk about Wrongs Done to Me by People I Did Not Realize Were Terrible Until Much Too Late, but that gets wearisome pretty quickly — as do, to my infinite regret, a number of Janet Malcolm’s books, including In the Freud Archives. (But not The Silent Woman, which I still really love, and maybe it’s just because I’m more interested in troublesome literary executors than I am in scholars who went around scandalizing Freud’s name in the 1980s when Freud was still (sorry Freud!) relevant to mental health practice.) Wearisome and not worthwhile.

Cover report: I like the faux-wrinkly business the British cover has going on, but I think the American cover is more visually interesting. I am also fond of collage where pieces of the collage have writing on them. So that is my bias. I will accept counterarguments.

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Cover report: Ooo, this one’s tough. Aesthetically I think the British cover is better, but I hate the tagline, and I think the American cover says more about the contents of the book. I’m giving it to the American cover in a squeaker. I will accept counterarguments.

The end (here there be spoilers so skip them if you don’t want them): The faerie queen who is so awful gets deposed, and Luke something soul something something. (I don’t know, I was bored with Luke’s whole quest to regain his soul.) And James doesn’t die. Hooray. I like James because the faerie all call him “the piper”, which makes me think of Fire and Hemlock and have consequent warm fuzzy feelings.

The whole: I love and trust y’all so I am giving Lament the benefit of the doubt, and I’m going to read Ballad to see if things improve from here. I read it at a slightly unfortunate time, having just made a list of love story fails for the Eleanor and Park podcast, and Lament fell into a lot of those traps. Stiefvater included just enough pleasing details to keep me interested — like the four-leaf clovers that kept appearing on Deirdre’s clothes — and just enough subverting of gender norms to make me curious about the subsequent books. (Further details on this would be spoilers, but suffice it to say that a lady is called upon to rescue a gentleman, rather than the other way around.)

That said, there is a dreadful power imbalance in the central relationship because Luke is a hundreds-of-years-old faerie assassin and Deirdre is a human teenager, but this isn’t addressed. Important question: Doesn’t Luke feel icky about this? Because I would feel icky dating a teenager now, and I am much fewer than hundreds of years older than a teenager.

Also: Insta-love rears its ugly head. There are so many ways to make insta-love suck less, and I don’t understand why authors are too lazy to do them. For instance, the author could signal the reader that this is not as true a love as the starry-eyed teenaged protagonist thinks it is. Or the author could pay lip service to depicting a few reasons why these characters would want to be around each other. I can see why Deirdre would be intrigued by a handsome older guy who plays duets with her and thinks she’s amazing, but it’s not really clear why Luke is so into Deirdre, out of all the girls and women he’s encountered over centuries of work. What makes this one so particular? Is it just her way around a harp? (Because that’s all it seems to be.)

Also: Love triangle. Gag. Over it. I am particularly over it because of the thing where you can see a million sensible reasons why Deirdre would be into James, her age-appropriate joke-making best friend, and like two reasons she would be into Luke. I don’t mind if Deirdre isn’t into James, but if she’s going to be into Luke and they’re going to have James moping about on the sidelines, I’d like to know why. What’s good about Luke besides that he’s following Deirdre around? What’s stopping her from being with James? (Not into him is a valid answer, but say the answer. Westermarck effect is also a valid answer.)

If you are a Maggie Stiefvater fan, would you be willing to make some remarks in the comments about this book vs The Scorpio Races and the Shiver books and The Raven Boys? Is this an early effort that you can tell it’s an early effort and her later books are better?

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Hillary Jordan is a gifted writer. The opening few chapters of Mudbound, which take place after the main action of the book, hint at what’s to come without drawing attention to the cleverness of the foreshadowing. This is a trick many authors struggle to accomplish. Jordan does it, I think, by not seeming to care what the reader knows or doesn’t know about the events of the book. Here’s an excerpt from Laura McAllan’s first point-of-view chapter:

But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that…

 

[M]y father-in-law was murdered because I was born plain rather than pretty. That’s one possible beginning. There are others: Because Henry saved Jamie from drowning in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Because Pappy sold the land that should have been Henry’s. Because Jamie flew too many bombing missions in the war. Because a Negro named Ronsel Jackson shone too brightly. Because a man neglected his wife, and a father betrayed his son, and a mother exacted her revenge. I suppose the beginning depends on who’s telling the story. No doubt the others would start somewhere different, but they’d still wind up at the same place in the end.

That is a well-written and economical way of telling you, Expect tragedy. Okay, Hillary Jordan! I am duly primed for tragedy!

Cover report: I don’t love either one. I guess I will go with the American cover, because it’s a smidge less generic? I don’t know. I don’t feel happy about it.

The end (spoilers in this section only, so skip it if you don’t want to know): This is not my first rodeo. Good outcomes are unlikely in books about sharecropping and racism in 1946 Mississippi. Duly, the end of the book indicates that the the Jacksons have packed up everything to leave the town, following some kind of racism-related violent thing that has befallen their oldest son. It also appears that Jamie killed his father. I paged backward to find out why and really really wish I had not, because the murder motive is tied to what happened to the Jacksons’ son, and it’s much horrible than I was imagining. If I had not been reading this book for book club, I’m not sure I’d have finished it. I do not have the stomach for this kind of ugliness.

The whole: Mea culpa, friends. I couldn’t finish this book, even though it was a book for work book club. The ending was brutal, and when I got far enough into the book to observe that it was going to be brutal all the way through, and culminate with the horrible thing I read about at the end, I just couldn’t take it. This:

[Ronsel, a black World War II veteran] tried to step around them, but Orris moved to stand in his way. “Well, looky here. A jig in uniform.”

 

Ronsel’s body went very still, and his eyes locked with Orris’s. But then he dropped his gaze and said, “Sorry, suh. I wasn’t paying attention.”

Y’all, I don’t know, it has been a rough month and maybe I am emotionally fragile, but when Henry McAllan went to the Jackson’s house later, and made Ronsel apologize to the men who called him “boy” after he fought for his country, and made him leave the store through the back door, I don’t know. I couldn’t handle it.

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The end (no spoilers you couldn’t guess on your own; but still, spoilers): Not very informative. Looee is no longer living with Walt and Judy, a future we all saw coming. He now lives in what seems like qualified contentment with some other chimpanzees. Maybe a refuge? A portion of the sales profits on this book are going to Save the Chimps, a Florida refugee for chimpanzees rescued from research labs and entertainment industries, so maybe Looee has ended up somewhere similar? I can’t really tell.

The whole: A Beautiful Truth (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is the second book I’ve read this fall about humans attempting to raise chimpanzees as if they were people, and about the scope of the similarity between humans and our closest cousins, the (other) great apes. The first, Karen Joy Fowler’s wonderful We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, is about the relative humanity of animals; whereas A Beautiful Truth is about the relative animalness of humans. Perhaps McAdam’s greatest narrative success is in describing the behavior of humans in exactly the same dispassionate tone as he uses to describe the behavior of the chimpanzee community where Looee will eventually end up:

[Judy] bought a Little Learners two-sided wood easel, and she would stand and paint on one side while he sat up on a stool and painted on the other. He regularly came around to her side and made his noise for I like this. Sometimes she imagined she could see real shapes in his paintings. Maybe that was possible.

Cf descriptions from the chimpanzee community:

Ghoul [a chimpanzee] got down from his chair and walked carefully. He looked through the open doorway and the Visitor was eating and making noises. Dave [a human, Ghoul’s main trainer] was sitting on his chair and Ghoul looked at all the chomp that went into the machine and wondered whether to eat or run or jump on Dave or hide in his bedroom with a doll. Dave said Ghoul be good in his normal Dave voice and he got down on the floor and they sat.

That isn’t to say that this is not an impassioned book. In interviews promoting the book, Colin McAdam has described his experiences visiting a chimpanzee refuge as “life-changing”. He says that visiting with these chimpanzees, who had been brutally mistreated in various settings over the course of their lives, and finding them still sociable and wanting to be friends, made him rethink all of the things (like empathy, and grace) that we tend to consider the exclusive realm of humans.

Though the above remarks by McAdam, combined with the donation of proceeds to the Save the Chimps organization, led me to expect a sentimentalized depiction of the chimpanzees. In fact it’s anything but. The events that take Looee away from Walt and Judy are horrifying — the more so because they seem to come out of nowhere — and the chimpanzee community undergoes several brutal power shifts that leave chimps injured or dead. But the book’s strength is that cruelty and thoughtlessness fly in all directions, irrespective of species: for instance, we see chimpanzees repeatedly infected with various strains of diseases ranging from the common cold to HIV, as pharmaceutical companies work to find a cure; and the humans who observe the chimpanzee community do not step in during violence episodes, even to prevent infanticide.

Having just this moment described McAdam as unflinching, honesty compels me to admit that he flinches when it comes to chimpanzee sex. My distaste for cutesy sexual euphemisms is well (and shoutily) documented, and now I know that it extends to cutesy chimpanzee sexual euphemisms (rosé, pinned as in the dude chimps pin the lady chimps, y’all, I know, I feel gross even typing this; there were also some words McAdam made up which felt weird in another way but bothered me much less). Inconsistent deployment of these euphemisms did not markedly decrease my dislike of their use. But this is a relatively small gripe in an otherwise sure-handed book.

Cover report: American cover wins. You can’t tell from the picture, but the sky part of the cover is matte, while the white square that the chimpanzee is caged in is a glossy white. It’s a cool, effective cover design.

Note: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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