A surprising but ultimately unpersuasive novel about the human animal.
A Canadian woman gives birth to a human-ape hybrid in LePan’s novel.
Lucy Gerson was raised in the working-class community of Comber, Ontario. After an engagement ends in heartache, the 20-something woman decides to use money that she inherited from a wealthy uncle and visit her anthropologist sister, Susie, who lives far away in Congo. Lucy becomes fascinated by the bonzees that Susie is studying—a fictionalspecies of great ape that’s similar to a chimpanzee. Her fascination grows into something more when the wine-drunk woman has a sexual encounter, initiated by one of the apes in the jungle. Afterward, Lucy is pregnant, and after some difficult consideration about what to do, she eventually gives birth to a half-human, half-bonzee son named Bonbon. The new arrival is immediately a tabloid sensation; some people think he’s a miracle, others an abomination, and still others a rare opportunity for scientific study. What’s clear, however, is that many are undecided about whether Bonbon should be considered human. After being declared an animal by the Canadian courts, Bonbon is placed in the care of the Toronto Zoo, although Lucy lives nearby and attempts to raise him as best she can. While she battles with scientists—and herself—over the extent to which she has a right to her child, the maturing Bonbon must decide how he fits into the strange world around him.
LePan tells his story as a series of recorded statements given by the various characters—Lucy, Susie, Bonbon, and relevant researchers—who offer differing takes on the events of the novel. The work displays a great deal of control on the sentence level and adeptly presents a number of distinct voices along the way. Lucy is the main narrator, and the author provides her with a blue-collar vernacular that tends to occasionally drift into caricature. Here, for instance, she discusses her hometown of Comber: “that’s where we lived all the time we were growing up, ’cept for the year when I was five, that was when Dad ‘tried his luck’ in Montreal, but it turned out there wasn’t no luck there for him neither.” Despite the novel’s outlandish premise and broadly drawn protagonist, it isn’t really a comedy. Indeed, it attempts to work through the morality of the story with unexpected earnestness, and Bonbon’s lyrical idiolect is deployed for emotional impact: “My most long ago I member, it was to play on swing bars. And ropes, on the ropes. To swing to jump to laugh with Only, most little bonzee, and with Ever, bit bigger bonzee.” Even so, the novel doesn’t quite succeed as a Frankenstein-ish meditation on what makes someone human, either. The tone is slightly too odd, and the depiction of Lucy, in particular, borders too often on exploitative. These choices do seem to be intentional on the author’s part—at one point, Lucy even condemns readers for their condescending view of her—but they still leave an unpleasant aftertaste.
A surprising but ultimately unpersuasive novel about the human animal.Pub Date: May 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77183-718-7
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Miroland
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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