I love the messiness of it, I love the craziness of Charlotte and Callie's stories. No, this tension is knowing that so many things are wrong, so many things are close to breaking, that at any moment everything could fall apart and when that happens you don't know what it will look like. Not like a thriller where someone suddenly reveals they're about to blow up a building. It's the kind of book where anything could happen at any moment, where there's this feeling of tension that lies under the surface. It is running out ahead of you through dense jungle and you aren't sure you can keep up, oh and you have no idea where it is you're going. It does not hold your hand and talk sweetly to you while you walk a well-trodden path.
Through various points of views and perspectives we move through a telling of how we come to understand or misunderstand our most intimate human elements within the racialized and gendered culture we live in.” -Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowningĭo not be fooled by this warm and fuzzy title. Greenidge’s prose is incisive, clever, resounding with a deep intelligence.” -*Bill Cheng, author of Southern Cross the Dog We Love You, Charlie Freeman is a masterful meditation on race, anthropology, history, and the hurly-burly complications of family. “Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel reminds us that it is an exciting time to be reading fiction. “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 This “important debut from an important writer”* is ultimately an exploration of language, race, and history. Narrated primarily by Laurel’s teenage daughter, Charlotte, the story goes back in time to the founding of the institute, in the 1920s, revealing shocking past experiments. They’ve been hired by a private research institute to teach sign language to a chimpanzee who will live as part of their family. This ability eventually leads Laurel to uproot her husband and daughters from their overeducated and underpaid life in the South End of Boston for the bucolic Massachusetts countryside, where the Freemans are to take part in an experiment. “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.” -Colum McCannįrustrated by the limitations of cross-race communication in her predominantly white town, Laurel, a young African American girl, teaches herself to sign-a skill she later imparts to her two daughters.
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