fiction | morethanabookreview

Need
Reprint edition published April 4, 2017
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
By Joelle Charbonneau

Started March 26, 2018
Finished March 29, 2018
Pages 338

Brief synopsis:
Need takes place in the middle of a small Wisconsin town. The local high school students all receive a mysterious invitation to join a new social network called NEED. It is dark web meets real, everyday life. As students are asked to do ever more character changing tasks to receive what they think the need, the small community is struck by tragedy after tragedy. An interpretation of how selfish humans can be and a warning about how fast cyber bullying can take a turn to the unchangeable.

Why this book and why now:
My oldest is in middle school. His school librarian posed a challenge to all the students to read a series of six pre-selected books. Need is one of those books. While my son had no interest initially, my friend’s daughter (and my son’s classmate) did. I challenged her to read it with me and the reward would be a special outing to a local ceramics shop. She had already read four of the six, but wasn’t too keen on finishing the challenge. Well, game on! She’s already halfway through after just a couple of days.

I wasn’t too optimistic about a young adult/juvenile fiction book about cyber bullying would keep my interest, but since I had a middle schooler and knew that social media wasn’t going away, I thought this book would be a good conversation starter with both my son and his classmates.

There is plenty of content to start those conversations. From parent/young adult relationships, suicide, taking responsibility for your actions, and the importance of trust, if you have a teenager, it should be easy to find a story line to get your teen talking.

The overall pace and feel of the book had a Maze Runner meets Hunger Games on the internet vibe. Charbonneau introduced a lot of characters one short chapter at a time. There were so many characters and they did not spend much time face to face interacting that it was difficult to remember who was who. More time on developing the social structure and the who’s who at the beginning would have made it easy to understand the nuances that Charbonneau was trying to explain with characters like Jack and Gina . Their perception of self likely is very different then how their classmates viewed them and I think that would have added to the story development.

There were a few trigger topics that I was surprised to come across in the books. Especially for Bryan who had thoughts of suicide and discussed the methods he had considered. I would want any parent to know that this topic is broached in this book so that you can have a conversation with your pre-teen or teen. Having sons, I do worry that heartbreak or not meeting expectations and the resulting emotions will lead them to consider things with irreversible consequences.

Other difficult topics include, death of a parent, death of a classmate, anaphylaxis due to food allergies, adultery, siblings with a potentially terminal disease, murder, deceit and lying.

Recommended reading for:
While this book was suggested to middle school students, I would err on the side of 8th graders and older. The book revolves around high school students and the topics discussed are geared more toward a young adult stage of life. The romantic relationships are not physical, surprisingly so considering the number of times the teens are left alone.

If you are looking for a way to have a conversation with your kid about online behavior or just looking for a way to connect, this should be a book they are interested in reading and one that keeps a parent turning the pages without too many eye rolls.

The final word:
Need does not leave me needing more, but I am optimistic that it will give me a segue into deeper conversations with my son and his peers. Based on the pace and depth of the book, I think Charbonneau absolutely meets her target audience of young teens, giving them just enough to think about without the complication of overdone scene set ups. She takes advantage of their assumptions as to how a high school social structure works and allows them to project their own experiences within the story likely making the characters more relatable to them since they are filling in some of the gaps Charbonneau allowed.

Ape House
Published September 2010
Spiegel & Grau a division of Random House, Inc. by Sara Gruen

Started May 31, 2015
Finished June 18, 2015
306 Pages

Brief synopsis:
John Thigpen meets some extra-ordinary Bonobos apes for a newspaper assignment. Little does he know just how important this assignment will become to the bonobos. After his writing partner, Cat Douglas, steals his story, the ape research facility where he met Bonzi, Lola, Jelani, Makena, Sam, and Mbongo becomes the site of a malicious bombing. What happens to the apes and their dedicated care taker, Isabel Duncan, is a story of betrayal, dedication, and the fight for those without a voice. Ape House is the story of how pure intentions and collaboration often lead to our biggest rewards in life.

Why this book and why now:
I picked up Ape House at the same time that I grabbed Counting by 7s. At the time, I was looking for a novel to escape and provide some reprieve from the cycle of grieving my grandmother’s passing. I had very much enjoyed Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants so Ape House seemed an obvious choice while wandering the library bookshelves.

Frankly, this book is not about what I expected it to be. One of the first quotes I captured was, “Bonobos—along with dolphins and humans—are the only animals known to have recreational sex.” Page 10. This fact was new to me and I found it rather interesting. I did not expect the book to spend so much time focused on exploiting the sexuality of the apes. The more I read the book, I was remembered the sexual undertones in Water for Elephants. By no means am I trying to insinuate that I am a prude or am disturbed, embarrassed, or otherwise finger wagging at the topic, but the fact that the apes’ sexuality is such an integral part of the storyline was surprising and took a while to accept and adjust to while reading. I’m curious to know more about why Sara Gruen has chosen sexual experiences to be the lens through which she tells her stories, well at least the two that I have read so far (At the Water’s Edge is on my to-be-read list).

One topic that this book has made me more aware of over the last few weeks is that of animal testing. There is a scene in the book where Isabel Duncan visits a notorious chimp/ape research facility. During her experience on the inside Isabel learns of some of the tests the primates are subjected to including cancer research, mother/child bonding, etc. I am going to assume Gruen has done her research and that the experiments referenced are based on some form of actual tests being conducted on animals. As I’ve mulled this part of the story line over, it has made me wonder just how much harm has been done to animals in the name of medicine, food safety, and psychological understanding. I’ve recently started to cut out “mammal meat” from my diet as I have become more aware of the conditions and methods that cattle and hog farms use to raise these animals. And it also is becoming harder to justify eating something of my own classification. (No, I am not judging you or trying to subversively get you to stop eating your bacon cheeseburger.) I think I am going to save total awareness of animal testing for a little further into my journey to going mostly vegetarian.

One of the sub stories in the book revolved around John Thigpen’s wife, Amanda. Personally, I did not care for the way that Gruen portrayed Amanda. I think she wrote Amanda in a cliché fashion and solved Amanda’s problems with a stereotypical cliché. The last chapter of the book had me rolling my eyes as Gruen wrapped up all the loose ends from her story lines.

Recommended reading for:
Ape House is certainly a book for adults. There are some themes that made this book interesting such as that of the way humans treat animals, human fascination and simultaneous embarrassment regarding sex, and the value of unexpected friendships.

The final word:
The Author’s Note in Ape House is what redeemed the book for me. When I learned that Sara Gruen actually visited with bonobos apes and spoke with them, much as her main character did, I was suddenly much more interested. I wish Sara would have written more from this perspective and left some of the highly unlikely scenarios out or at least made them a little more believable. Again, I’m thinking of the way Amanda Thigpen was written and also the pizza parlor scene. This is very likely not a book I would look to reread nor is it a book I would think first to recommend.

A final note: While I may not list this book as one of my favorites or even as one I fully enjoyed reading, I have huge amounts of admiration and respect for any author. The discipline, research, persistence, dedication, and crazy amounts of time it takes to get a whole book written and published is admirable! The process of writing these few blog posts have opened my eyes to the huge level of commitment it takes to write something of quality and worth. The risk an author takes in putting their work out for the world to critique is amazing. I am grateful that so many author’s continue to produce new works, I’ve learned so much because of them all!

New words learned:
By default, all definitions for new words learned are sourced from Webster.com

Virtuosic (Page 10): a person who does something in a very skillful way
Crepitus (Page 22): popping and cracking noises of the joints
Soupcon (Page 35): a small amount of something
Prurient (Page 97): having or showing too much interest in sex
Occlusion (Page 135): the obstruction of the breath passage in the articulations of a speech sound
Oeuvre (Page 141): all the works that a writer, an artist, or a composer has created
Papadum (Page 227): a thin, crisp disc-shaped Indian and Pakistani food typically based on a seasoned dough made from black gram, fried or cooked with dry heat.

After looking up all of the new words I collected along the way, I question some of Gruen’s word choice. In the places that she used virtuosic (page 10) and papadum (page 227), assuming the webster definitions that I sourced are in alignment with her intention, the words just don’t seem to fit.

Selected quotes:
“Bonobos—along with dolphins and humans—are the only animals known to have recreational sex.” Page 10

“We are, all of us, collaborators. We are, in fact family.” Page 10
Wouldn’t it be amazing if more of us thought about the world around us in such a way?

“The business of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Page 34
I wish we could get the majority of the news media back to this in a less sensationalized way. There are many stories and humanitarian issues that could benefit from some compassion and helpful calls to action rather than the repeated reporting with no proffered solutions.

Have you read Ape House? Let me know what you think in the comments section.