I was very excited when I heard that Sara Gruen had a new novel coming out this fall.  I loved Water for Elephants and I know that many of you did also.  I began to read some of the reviews coming out about Ape House and they were very mixed…some loved it others hated it.  Being a bookseller as long as I have been I knew that they only way to know about this book was to read it myself.  Last week I got my chance because I got an advance copy from my lovely reps from Random House.  I went home on Thursday, ate some dinner and started reading and I finished Ape House on Friday!  I thoroughly enjoyed myself while reading  this book.  Do I think that everyone that loved Water for Elephants will love Ape House?  No, they are very different novels but I do think that everyone should give it a chance.

This is the story of a family of Bonobo Apes.  Sam, Bonzi, Lola, Mbongo, Jelani and Makena are part of an experiment to study their capability to have relationships with each other and humans.  In fact they have been taught American Sign Language and can communicate with Isabel, a scientist at the Great Ape Language Lab.  There is an explosion at the lab that injures Isabel and “liberates’ the apes.  After she leaves the hospital Isabel begins her search for the apes and comes to find out they have been purchased by man who has started a reality show called Ape House.   Isabel realizes that to save her “family” she must enlist the help of those she has never been able to fully connect with…her own kind, humans.  She enlists the help of a lab assistant, a reporter, a vegan protestor and a ex-porn star with plans of her own.

This is an article I found with Sara Gruen about why she wrote Ape House:

Sara Gruen on Ape House

Right before I went on tour for Water for Elephants, my mother sent me an email about a place in Des Moines, Iowa, that was studying language acquisition and cognition in great apes. I had been fascinated by human-ape discourse ever since I first heard about Koko the gorilla (which was longer ago than I care to admit) so I spent close to a day poking around the Great Ape Trust’s Web site. I was doubly fascinated–not only with the work they’re doing, but also by the fact that there was an entire species of great ape I had never heard of. Although I had no idea what I was getting into, I was hooked.

During the course of my research for Ape House, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Great Ape Trust–not that that didn’t take some doing. I was assigned masses of homework, including a trip to York University in Toronto for a crash course on linguistics. Even after I received the coveted invitation to the Trust, that didn’t necessarily mean I was going to get to meet the apes: that part was up to them. Like John, I tried to stack my odds by getting backpacks and filling them with everything I thought an ape might find fun or tasty–bouncy balls, fleece blankets, M&M’s, xylophones, Mr. Potato Heads, etc.–and then emailed the scientists, asking them to please let the apes know I was bringing “surprises.” At the end of my orientation with the humans, I asked, with some trepidation, whether the apes were going to let me come in. The response was that not only were they letting me come in, they were insisting.

The experience was astonishing–to this day I cannot think about it without getting goose bumps. You cannot have a two-way conversation with a great ape, or even just look one straight in the eye, close up, without coming away changed. I stayed until the end of the day, when I practically had to be dragged out, because I was having so much fun. I was told that the next day Panbanisha said to one of the scientists, “Where’s Sara? Build her nest. When’s she coming back?”

Most of the conversations between the bonobos and humans in Ape House are based on actual conversations with great apes, including Koko, Washoe, Booey, Kanzi, and Panbanisha. Many of the ape-based scenes in this book are also based on fact, although I have taken the fiction writer’s liberty of fudging names, dates, and places.

One of the places I did not disguise or rename is the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They take in orphaned infants, nurse them back to health, and when they’re ready, release them back into the jungle. This, combined with ongoing education of the local people, is one of the wild bonobos’ best hopes for survival.

One day, I’m going to be brave enough to visit Lola ya Bonobo. In the meantime, in response to Panbanisha’s question, I’m coming back soon. Very soon. I hope you have my nest ready!

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