We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of one of The New York Times’ most anticipated books of 2021, Libertie, and We Love You, Charlie Freeman, has been hailed as a “literary force to be reckoned with” (Buzzfeed). And Kaitlyn Greenidge continues to expand her literary terrain with this playful, masterful new work.” - Alexander Chee, author of HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

“If sex is your chosen way for you to know yourself and others, what happens when a pandemic comes-and you discover it is as essential to your survival as a vaccine? Maybe more so? Sharp, affectionate, bawdy fun, a story as wise as a new best friend found on a spring night at an orgy. Brilliant and sexy and aware and exactly what you need.” - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of FRIDAY BLACK Kaitlyn Greenidge has once again written something you won’t forget.

Orgy is rich with the absurdity of the world and ripe with the reality of our collective longing. (Mar.“A story so funny and alive with the moment. The end result is a sobering look at how we communicate with one another and what inevitably gets lost in translation. However, the themes of communication across differences is nonetheless deftly constructed, encompassing weighty issues such as race, language, sexuality, and the intersections of religion and science, arriving finally at a heartbreaking confrontation. The narrative structure is somewhat schematic, the pieces fitting together almost too perfectly as information is withheld to provide tension. Narrated mostly by Charlotte, a high school freshman, the story moves back and forth in time as we learn the secrets of the institute’s disturbing and shocking past. At the Toneybee Institute, the Freemans welcome a chimpanzee named Charlie into their family and begin an effort to earn his trust and, eventually, teach him to speak.

Although no members of the family are deaf, Laurel learned sign language at a young age as a result of her distrust of spoken language, growing up in Maine as the only black girl in a hundred-mile radius, and she has passed along this method of communication to her daughters. The Freemans-Laurel, Charles, and their two daughters, Charlotte and Callie-are a family recruited to the institute from the Boston area in 1990 on account of their skill at sign language, the methodology chosen for a new experiment. Greenidge’s ambitious debut novel is the multiperspective story of the Toneybee Institute, a converted music school in western Massachusetts ostensibly specializing in fostering communication between chimpanzees and humans.

We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge