At the start of We Love You, Charlie Freeman<\/i>, the Freemans (Laurel, Charles, and their daughters—Charlotte, who’s 14, and Callie, who’s 9) are in a shiny new car, driving from Dorchester to the Berkshires, where they’re going to be living at the Toneybee Institute and participating in a research experiment. The Toneybee Institute studies apes, and they’ll be living with a chimp named Charlie: they’re supposed to treat him like a family member and teach him sign language (which they know because Laurel learned it as an isolated\/lonely kid in Maine). This storyline, which is set in 1990, alternates with a 1929 storyline that also involves the Toneybee, this time focusing on a woman named Nymphadora and the experiences she and her neighbors (who, like the Freemans, are black) have with the Institute. Spoiler alert: the Institute’s past is horrible and racist, and maybe its present is, too, but Laurel is still convinced that the experiment is going to be a great opportunity for her and her family.<\/p>\n
The style and structure of this book really worked for me: sections of first-person narration by Charlotte and Nymphadora alternate with other sections, most but not all of which are third-person narration about Charlotte’s family members, and I liked the shifting focus. I also liked Charlotte’s voice, and the story of her freshman year of high school (including her sexual awakening) made for a satisfying through-line amidst all the darker things (which were also really satisfying and interesting, though differently). I took this book with me for a weekend away and found myself reading it pretty much nonstop on the train to and from Philadelphia, not wanting to put it down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the start of We Love You, Charlie Freeman, the Freemans (Laurel, Charles, and their daughters—Charlotte, who’s 14, and Callie, who’s 9) are in a shiny new car, driving from Dorchester to the Berkshires, where they’re going to be living at the Toneybee Institute and participating in a research experiment. The Toneybee Institute studies apes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}