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Nothing did, really. Leaving
their home, moving to another state, having to make new
friends, Charlotte Freeman hated it all. And this experiment
her parents had gotten them into, well, no.
Her mother, Laurel, sure was
excited about it, though. Ever since she was young, Laurel
had been fascinated with sign language, and she taught both
her daughters to sign as soon as they were old enough to
understand the motions. But a chimpanzee? A chimp the
Freemans would raise as a child, while they taught it sign
language?
Charlotte couldn’t ever imagine
spending the rest of her teenage years pretending that a
chimpanzee was her brother. She was leery of the “doctor”
who ran the program, and of the ancient woman who’d founded
the whole thing. They were white, the Freemans were black
and Charlotte suspected that race had something to do with
why The Toneybee Institute had hired her mother, but it
didn’t matter.
What mattered was that Charlotte
and her little sister seemed to be losing their mother’s
love to a chimpanzee.
Nobody had called Ellen Jericho
by her real name in years. They all called her by her Star
of the Morning name, Nymphadora, which was a name that made
her proud, and which was the name she’d given Dr. Gardner
when they first met.
They made their acquaintance
because he’d been bothering the town’s children with his
obsessive sketching. Her Star sisters asked her to ask him
to stop, which Nymphadora did – brokering a deal with him to
sketch her instead, in poses that he chose.
She didn’t expect to fall in
love with him, nor was she prepared to stumble upon the
horrible reason why Gardner wanted her to pose unclothed.
And more than 70 years later, Charlotte was equally
surprised at what she discovered…
For sure, We Love You,
Charlie Freeman is sharp as an axe.
Author Kaitlyn Greenidge doesn’t
just touch upon the issue of race, she tackles it and knocks
it to the ground. This, while we squirm over what we see
happening to the people in the story, and what we think is
coming.
Yep, Greenidge is good at making
readers uneasy.
That dis-ease, however, fully
extends to the character, Nymphadora, who’s introduced with
her Star of the Morning lineage in a way that made me wonder
if this was a time-travel novel. It’s not – but it took me a
good long while to understand so.
Knowing that will make less of a
struggle in reading this novel, and it’ll help you to love
it as much as I did. For a book with edginess, unrest, and
just enough weirdness, We Love You, Charlie Freeman
is worth a try.
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