Weekend picks for book lovers
What should you read this weekend? Paste BN’s picks for book lovers include a debut novel about a family living with a chimp, and a novel for kids that celebrates the childhood friendship of Harper Lee and Truman Capote.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge; Algonquin, 324 pp.; fiction
Charlotte, the protagonist of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel, is a 14-year-old girl who’s facing a host of culture shocks. Her family has uprooted itself from the Boston suburbs to rural Massachusetts. She’s now one of the few black students at her school. And her new "sibling" is a primate.
The title character of We Love You, Charlie Freeman is a chimpanzee living in the Toneybee Institute for Ape Research, founded by a wealthy eccentric woman in the 1920s.
Charlie’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. Charlie is an experimental specimen, and in a “wilderness of whiteness” where Charlotte’s family is closely monitored, she increasingly feels like one, too.
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.
Paste BN says *** out of four stars. “Witty and provocative … deftly handles a host of complex themes and characters.”
Tru & Nelle by G. Neri; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 323 pp., ages 7-10; fiction
This novel for children celebrates the real-life childhood friendship in small-town Alabama of a “perfect pair of misfits” – Truman Capote and Harper Lee, who grew up to become titanic literary figures.
Paste BN says *** stars. “A fluid, sweet-tempered account of (an) amazing American friendship.”
So As I Was Saying...: My Somewhat Eventful Life by Frank Mankiewicz and Joel L. Swerdlow; Thomas Dunne, 267 pp.; non-fiction
Posthumous memoir by Frank Mankiewicz, a son of old Hollywood who became a quintessential Washington insider.
Paste BN says ***½ stars. “Breezy.”
Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore; Hogarth, 290 pp.; fiction
Debut novel takes a realistically flawed young woman on a journey around the world, from small-town California to Paris to New York to Sri Lanka.
Paste BN says *** stars. “An often entertaining and thought-provoking debut…leaves the reader ready to hear more from Tennant-Moore and her distinctive voice.”
Love, Loss, and What We Ate by Padma Lakshmi; Ecco, 336 pp.; non-fiction
The host of Top Chef writes a memoir in which she makes it clear that, in spite of her ravishing beauty, little has come to her without effort.
Paste BN says *** stars. “Appealing.”
Contributing reviewers: Mark Athiakis, Charles Finch, Ray Locker, Kelly Lawler, Elysa Gardner