Reading Half Brother (2010) was somewhat surreal. I kept having this memory of reading not this book, but another book, quite similar to this book, but somehow darker, but maybe the same book?
Turns out I was remembering Karen Joy Fowler‘s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), which I read way back when before Reading Well started. The two novels share a core structure of a family raising a chimpanzee as if it were a human child, and both are told from the perspective of an older human “sibling” (in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, it’s a sister; in Half Brother, it’s a brother). There’s more–issues of animal cruelty are, predictably and understandably, central to both; some of the settings and observations of human/ chimpanzee interaction are strikingly similar, etc.
I have no idea if they had any effect on each other’s development or not, nor do I know how or why Half Brother crossed my path.
Fowler’s book has some darker moments, so I had this feeling of dread reading Kenneth Oppel‘s novel, which is actually much, much lighter–it falls squarely in the YA realm, tracing both the relationship with the chimp as well as the protagonist’s social development in his early teens.
It’s lightweight and enjoyable, and the chimpanzee angle adds depth to the usual tropes of parental struggles and early romantic attractions and the like. If that sounds too YA for your taste, pick up Fowler’s book, which is quite a bit more demanding.