In 1929 a woman submits to a doctor’s efforts to sketch black locals to secretly substantiate his flimsy phrenological theories. That’s the novel’s point: Shifting in time from the 1990s to the '20s, Greenidge reveals the Toneybee’s past as a dank pit of pseudoscience, home to eugenics experiments meant to equate blacks and apes.
Charlie is an experimental specimen, and in a “wilderness of whiteness” where Charlotte’s family is closely monitored, she increasingly feels like one, too. The title character of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin, 324 pp., *** out of four stars) is a chimpanzee living in the Toneybee Institute for Ape Research, founded by a wealthy eccentric woman in the 1920s.Ĭharlie’s new live-in family at the institute is charged with teaching him sign language, though nobody is deaf: Charlotte’s mother, who “had grown up as the only black girl in the state of Maine,” picked up signing to cope with her isolation and passed the skill on to her daughters. She’s now one of the few black students at her school. Her family has uprooted itself from the Boston suburbs to rural Massachusetts. So at the end of the novel, when she makes her final decision, I know she didn’t turn back.Charlotte, the protagonist of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s witty and provocative debut novel, is a 14-year-old girl who’s facing a host of culture shocks. Libertie didn’t know what freedom was, but she knew she deserved more than what was given her. The beauty of this novel is in that realization. She’s someone I saw myself in, and like most historical novels written about Black women, thanked God I would never be. When mourning the loss of another character, Libertie adjusts her perspective: “Care, I decided, was monstrous.” Although she never shares that realization with another character, I doubt a single reader would disagree.Īt times, I could predict how she would react because I felt I knew her so well. She keeps so much of the way she thinks hidden from other characters (for a myriad of reasons), that it’s an intimate joy to get a glimpse into her logical, sympathetic mind. The words are plain and then she asks, “Was freedom worth it if you still ached like that? If you were still bound to this earth by desire?” I had to pause, reading once, twice again, before pouring back into the book.īecause the book is written in the first person, readers are allowed to get intimate with Libertie’s thoughts.
Libertie’s most intimate moments happen when she’s alone, lost in thought. “Libertie’' is an easy page turner - its simple prose makes the plot digestible and the lyrical sentences sing louder.
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