We Love You, Charlie Freeman

By: Kaitlyn Greenidge

Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Karole Foreman, Myra Lucretia Taylor

Frustrated by the limitations of cross-race communication in her predominantly white town, a young African American girl teaches herself to sign. Years later, Laurel uproots her husband and daughters from their downwardly mobile, overeducated, and underpaid life in the South End of Boston for Cortland County, Massachusetts. The Freemans are to take part in an experiment: They've been hired by a private research institute to teach sign language to a chimpanzee.

Told primarily from the point of view of Laurel's elder daughter, Charlotte, the novel shifts in time from the early 1990s to the founding of the institute in the 1930s to the present day. With language both beautiful and accessible, Greenidge examines that time in each person's life when we realize the things we thought were normal may be anything but.

©2016 Kaitlyn Greenidge (P)2016 Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel slips a very skillful knife under the skin of American life. This is a story about family, about language, about history, and its profound echoes. In particular, she is surgically brilliant when it comes to the issue of race: She pushes the story into brand new territory. The novel does what all good art should do - it creates an appearance of ease, but then it returns to haunt and question us. This is an allegory that pays tribute to Ellison, to Morrison, to Wideman and Doctorow, and it is every bit as necessary and provocative as Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist." (Colum McCann)

"Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel reminds us that is an exciting time to be reading fiction. We Love You Charlie Freeman is a masterful meditation on race, anthropology, history, and the hurly-burly complications of family. Greenidge's prose is incisive, clever, resounding with a deep intelligence. Her characters and their universes hum with yearning as they guide us into its most secret and uncanny of places. Full of humor and aching, We Love You Charlie Freeman stands to be an important debut from an important writer." (Bill Cheng, author of Southern Cross the Dog)

IDENTITY

Kaitlyn Greenidge's "We Love You..." is an ironic tale about love and discrimination that blurs the line between science research, social truth, and exploitation. The story of Greenidge's book does not cross the same line as the Tuskegee Experiments in 1932 and 1972 but it shows how it could happen. One may argue Greenidge defines the line to explain the ethical purpose of scientific research, but she also clearly illustrates how emotional entanglement influences human behavior which interferes with ethical purpose.

Greenidge's story addresses three types of love. There is family love, human to animal love, and human to human love. Loves similarities, differences, and causes for break-up are illustrated. A woman loves a man who does not love her but exploits what she has to offer. A woman loves a woman but moves on to love another woman just as many of both sexes do. A married couple falls out of love with their mate. A spouse chooses to love an idea more than a person.

To this listener, there are too many fragmentary ideas in Greenidge's story that fail to move one to a singular appreciation of her creativity.

Great until the last chapter

I really liked this book and the different narrators. I felt like I was truly there in whichever setting the narrator was in. I did not like the ending before the epilogue, it felt rushed and maybe should have had another chapter before the epilogue. Overall, written well, but I wish the ending was more.

Amazing

I heard about this book listening to Heidi Durrow's podcast, The Mixed Experience. Ms. Durrow interviewed the author and I was intrigued. The idea of an African-American family raising a chimpanzee as a member of their family seemed unreal. This story is one of humor and sorrow. And, it is one that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Weird book

Wild and not well narrated. Did not like this one at all.The author lost me at time and I just couldn’t relate-disappointing