#BookReview: WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN by Kaitlyn Greenidge

The Freemans aren’t the typical family. They’re typical in the sense of two parents and two kids, but atypical in that they’re a hearing family that speaks in sign language. Growing out of the mother’s, Laurel’s, fascination with signing as a child, she goes on to major in it and teach her daughters, Charlotte and Callie to sign as well. Laurel is a bit quirky, but that’s why her husband, Charles, fell for her.

Having been subjected to less than ideal classrooms because of her refusal to “sign white,” Laurel jumps at the opportunity to move her family from the city to rural Massachusetts where she and her family will adopt a chimpanzee into their family with the idea of teaching him to sign. Out of all the families interviewed for an opportunity to live and work at the prestigious Toneybee Institute, Charlotte is horrified to find they’ve been chosen. Not only will she have to live in close quarters with an animal, he’s taken on her nickname and she’s to treat him as a sibling. Callie falls for Charlie immediately and easily takes on the characteristics of a middle child. She dotes on Charlie, lashes out at Charlotte and feels overlooked by her parents.

While the family dynamics during the experiment are interesting to watch, I was far more blown away by the backstory of the mysterious woman found in brochures at the institute. Nymphadora is the only child of a pharmacist and his wife. As members of Spring City’s elite, her mother was a Star of the Morning and her father was a Saturnite. Becoming a Star was all Nymphadora ever wanted; so what if she was a 36 year old spinster schoolteacher? At least she had her dignity before her parent’s unfortunate demise. Her vulnerability makes her susceptible to the white man that comes snooping around Spring City doing research.

Presenting himself as an anthropologist, Dr. Gardner makes the residents of Spring City uncomfortable. Why is a white man studying residents of their town as if they’re animals in a zoo? He’s acting at the behest of Julia Toneybee-Leroy, his well off patroness who fancies herself a lover of monkeys. Nymphadora is drawn in by him, lonely woman that she is. Taking the risk of bringing shame on herself and to her race, she’ll do anything to keep Dr. Gardner near her.

As the story shifts back and forth between 1929 Nymphadora and the present day Freemans, it’s interesting to watch how both Nymphadora and Laurel are sucked into the web the institute weaves. Both women seem to relinquish all common sense and give in to the requests of various members of the institute. While Nymphadora only has her sense of self to lose, Laurel’s entire family is at risk.

The whole time I was reading this, I kept wondering what was missing in Laurel that she would put everything aside, including her husband and children, for one chimpanzee. It seemed that she was determined to prove her worth by teaching Charlie to sign, but at what price? How did Laurel’s lack of parenting affect her girls? Affect her husband? She’s watching her family implode, but the only thing that matters to her is Charlie.

We Love You, Charlie Freeman is one of those stories that stays with you. When I first finished it, I thought, well that’s a 3 star read. Then it kept creeping into my thoughts the rest of the evening. I woke up thinking about it. There’s a lot to unpack and it’s not easily done while you’re actually reading the stories of the Freemans and Nymphadora and the white gaze of their benefactors. The fact that it stayed with me for so long is a sure indicator that Kaitlyn Greenidge accomplished what she set out to do, which is make the reader think.

336 p.
Published: March 2016
Disclaimer: Copy of book received from publisher, opinions are my own.

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New Books Coming Your Way, March 8, 2016

Half a Lifelong Romance by Eileen Chang
400 p.
Fiction; China

Shen Shijun, a young engineer, has fallen in love with his colleague, the beautiful Gu Manzhen. He is determined to resist his family’s efforts to match him with his wealthy cousin so that he can marry the woman he truly loves. But dark circumstances—a lustful brother-in-law, a treacherous sister, a family secret—force the two young lovers apart. As Manzhen and Shijun go on their separate paths, they lose track of one another, and their lives become filled with feints and schemes, missed connections and tragic misunderstandings. At every turn, societal expectations seem to thwart their prospects for happiness. Still, Manzhen and Shijun dare to hold out hope—however slim—that they might one day meet again.

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Afro-Politics and Civil Society in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
by Kwame Dixon
192 p.
Political Science; Caribbean & Latin American

Brazil’s black population, one of the oldest and largest in the Americas, mobilized a vibrant antiracism movement from grassroots origins when the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s. Campaigning for political equality after centuries of deeply engrained racial hierarchies, African-descended groups have been working to unlock democratic spaces that were previously closed to them.

Using the city of Salvador as a case study, Kwame Dixon tracks the emergence of black civil society groups and their political projects: claiming new citizenship rights, testing new anti-discrimination and affirmative action measures, reclaiming rural and urban land, and increasing political representation. This book is one of the first to explore how Afro-Brazilians have influenced politics and democratic institutions in the contemporary period.

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The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson
208 p.
Fiction; African-American

The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive.

Crystal Wilkinson offers up Opulence and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs, and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love -- and love that's handed down -- can conquer. At once tragic and hopeful, this captivating novel is a story about another time, rendered for our own.

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What is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
336 p.
Fiction; short stories

Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret—Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. In “Books and Roses” one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers’ fates. In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. “’Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” involves a “house of locks,” where doors can be closed only with a key—with surprising, unobservable developments. And in “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don’t You Think,” a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).

Oyeyemi’s creative vision and storytelling are effervescent, wise, and insightful, and her tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers.

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Guapa by Saleem Haddad
368 p.
Fiction; Middle East; LGBT

Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country,as he tries to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and social upheaval. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa’s grandmother — the woman who raised him — catches them in bed together. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar, Guapa, who has been arrested by the police. Ashamed to go home and face his grandmother, and reeling from the potential loss of the three most important people in his life, Rasa roams the city’s slums and prisons, the lavish weddings of the country’s elite, and the bars where outcasts and intellectuals drink to a long-lost revolution. Each new encounter leads him closer to confronting his own identity, as he revisits his childhood and probes the secrets that haunt his family. As Rasa confronts the simultaneous collapse of political hope and his closest personal relationships, he is forced to discover the roots of his alienation and try to re-emerge into a society that may never accept him.

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We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge
336 p.
Fiction; African-American

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.

The power of this novel resides in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s undeniable storytelling talents. What appears to be a story of mothers and daughters, of sisterhood put to the test, of adolescent love and grown-up misconduct, and of history’s long reach, becomes a provocative and compelling exploration of America’s failure to find a language to talk about race.

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