YA Guy Reviews... RESCUED by Eliot Schrefer!

When YA Guy was a lad of five, I visited the Pittsburgh Zoo with my father. This was in the days that zoos were essentially prisons, with animals held in solitary confinement in barred, concrete cells. Being too young to realize the full implications of that, I wandered with my dad to the ape and monkey house, my favorite part of the zoo. I enjoyed watching the gorilla in particular, though even at that age, it puzzled me that he was alone, that he did little but stare dully out of his cage all day, except when on occasion he'd regurgitate his food and pick through it. But again, at age five, I was thinking much more about my own pleasure at seeing such an awesome animal than about that animal's well-being, much less his rights.

On this particular day, a surprise awaited me: a trainer had a baby chimpanzee named Geraldine, and was offering visitors the chance to hold her. I eagerly volunteered, and when the little creature wrapped her furry arms around my neck and rested her head on my cheek, I felt something that Eliot Schrefer captures expertly in his book RESCUED:

"It was the first time I'd held something so delicately alive, something it was in my power to drop or save. I went silent with responsibility."

In Schrefer's book, it's a baby orangutan that the narrator, John, is holding, a present from John's irresponsible and eager-to-please father. But the feeling is almost entirely the same. It's from the moment I held Geraldine that I date not only my love for great apes but, far more importantly, my sense of responsibility to them.

RESCUED is the third book in Schrefer's planned four-book YA series about the great apes: bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. Each book, though entirely different from the others in setting and character, features a young person's relationship with one of the four species of ape. In the first two, ENDANGERED (bonobos) and THREATENED (chimpanzees), the settings are African and the apes living in a wild or, at least, semi-wild condition. In RESCUED, by contrast, the setting is the U.S., and the orangutan, Raja, grows up as a captive house pet. The book's action revolves around John's growing realization that Raja is not rightfully his and the teen's subsequent efforts to return him to Sumatra, from which he was stolen as a baby.

I'm going to put it out there right now: Schrefer's books are my favorite YA series of all time. That's partly because of their subject matter, but it's also because of their beautiful writing, vivid characters (human and ape), lush descriptions of ape behavior and human-ape interaction, and keen moral sensibility. Schrefer doesn't preach, but he doesn't pull punches either: John comes to learn that it's wrong, plain and simple, to keep wild things captive, and he takes enormous risks to rectify a crime to which, as a child, he was a willing if unknowing accomplice. Late in the book, the following moment of intimacy between ape and human clinches John's determination to set his childhood friend free:

"Raja kept probing me. When his golden eyes met mine directly I felt more fully seen by him than by any human in my life. It was like he was navigating back and forth in my heart, sifting and sorting every little feeling he found. Neither of us had a self while our eyes were linked: John and Raja were shared between us."

Apes are as close to human as non-human animals can be. But they're also utterly unique creatures, with lives and needs and agendas distinct from ours. That we've come close to extinguishing all of our nearest relatives on Earth (orangutans, along with mountain gorillas, being the most critically endangered of the great apes) speaks very poorly for our humanity. But in a book such as RESCUED, we glimpse what our relationship to these creatures could and should be: one of mutual interest, love, and respect, starting with respect for their right to live their lives without our interference. Maybe, if we can learn this about the apes, we can learn it about the rest of the world's inhabitants as well.

YA Guy Reviews... THREATENED by Eliot Schrefer

As YA Guy has probably told you, I love apes. So I was thrilled when I heard that Eliot Schrefer, whose novel about bonobos, Endangered, was a National Book Award finalist, plans to write three additional books on each of the three additional great apes: chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas.

And I'm happy to report that the second book in the series, Threatened (which deals with the bonobo's better-known cousin, the chimpanzee), is a small masterpiece, gorgeously written and profoundly moving.

Like Endangered, which I reviewed here, Threatened focuses on a young person's relationship with a great ape family--in this case, young Luc's relationship with the chimpanzees of his home country, Gabon. An orphan whose mother and younger sister died of AIDS and whose father abandoned his surviving child, Luc slaves away for a vicious debt collector to pay his mother's medical bill. But then salvation arrives in the form of a mysterious Muslim who calls himself Prof, a researcher intent on becoming Africa's answer to Jane Goodall. Though Luc joins Prof merely to escape his troubles, he forms a stronger connection to the man once they reach the jungles of Gabon and encounter a small and fragile family of chimpanzees. There Luc must decide which bonds to honor: his allegiance to Prof, or his commitment to the non-human subjects of Prof's research.

Threatened is a character-driven novel, with wonderful portraits not only of the frightened Luc and the shady, haunted Prof but of the chimpanzees whom Luc names Drummer and Mango. One of the fascinating aspects of the book is that while Prof tends to romanticize the chimpanzees, seeing them as virtuous alternatives to human depravity, Luc--and through him the author--offers a much more complex, balanced portrayal of creatures that are at once sensitive, caring, violent, and volatile. These chimps are capable of great tenderness, and also of great destruction. In other words, they're pretty much like us--as one would expect of humanity's nearest genetic relative.

The campaign for diversity in YA hasn't touched much (or at all) on inter-species diversity. But maybe it should. After all, non-human animals are among the most under-represented (and poorly represented) of populations in YA literature--and unlike human populations, they have no opportunity to tell their own stories. If the movement for diversity in YA ever does expand beyond human beings, Schrefer's wonderful novels will surely be included on any list of essential reading.

YA Guy Reviews... ENDANGERED by Eliot Schrefer

YA Guy loves apes.

It's true. My favorite animal since childhood is the gorilla. My favorite movie is King Kong (the '33 original). When I was a child, maybe five years old, I held a baby chimpanzee named Geraldine at the local zoo. She wrapped her furry arms around me and put her head on my shoulder. I was in heaven.

So I was very excited to read Eliot Schrefer's book Endangered, which concerns a teenage girl's effort to save a young bonobo (a relative of the chimpanzee) and herself during an armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Not surprisingly, given its subject matter, I loved it.

The story is as straightforward as I've described it above. The prose is luminous. The main character, Sophie, is sympathetic--part action hero, but mostly thoughtful, caring, vulnerable teen. And her bonobo companion, Otto, is every bit as vivid a character as Sophie. All the bonobos in the story are like that: distinct, lively personalities who are nearly human not only in the literal sense (bonobos share 99% of our genetic material) but in the literary and, dare I say, spiritual sense.

And that's the key conflict in the book: a conflict between those who treat life with reverence and care and those who treat other living beings, whether fellow humans or apes, as mere things to be exploited. There are powerful themes operating in the book's deceptively simple storyline, and powerful moments as Sophie has to decide whether the life of a single non-human creature holds any weight in a world plunged into chaos and death:

I thought not only about [the bonobos] but of the stream of homeless refugees, of my dead friends in the sanctuary, of the larger and yet-unknown tragedies elsewhere in the country, in the world. The creature in my arms wasn't an answer, but it did somehow make the question of how to keep going irrelevant. The weight of him, the prevention of his misery, was the answer that defied all logic.

I might quibble that these thoughts and sentences are overly sophisticated for a teen (the book's concluding chapter suggests that the entire narrative is told from the point of view of Sophie's adult self). But in a world such as ours, where not only apes but humans are endangered by our own violent ways, I found Schrefer's fictional treatment of these themes timely and welcome.

And as someone who's held a baby chimpanzee in his arms, I know exactly how Sophie feels.