This book certainly wasn’t anything that I normally would have picked up. The cover is a little bland, mostly blue sky and trees, although at the bottom there is a fence of sorts and a tiny monkey-like face is peeking over. I didn’t see the monkey face at all when I picked up this book on CD from the library. I was simply looking for something to listen to right away since I had finished my previous book. I don’t usually care much for ‘chick lit’ type books, which is what I judged this to be simply by the cover. I was wrong. Ape House was so much more. As the book went on, I became more and more involved in the story until I felt like I was waiting on the edge of my seat for the next climax in the story.
Isabel Duncan is an ape researcher in Kansas who has been working with a group of Bonobos (small chimps), teaching them American Sign Language. She is engaged to Peter, director of the Great Apes Language Lab where the Bonobos are being studied. Later, we learn that Peter is a cad and there is a break up (thankfully, Peter is not a very interesting character, at least until later on, although he never really ‘fills out’ much). John Thigpen is a newspaper reporter who has just met the apes and interviewed Isabel. He's married to Amanda. She's a failing novelist who has written one book that didn't do very well. Amanda starts out as a very interesting character, yet soon becomes an annoyance with her extreme self-conscious behavior that, for me, took away from the heart of the story nearly every time she appeared after her initial introduction.
The ape lab gets blown up. The Bonobos escape and it is unknown what exactly has happened to them. Isabel is badly hurt and requires reconstructive surgery. Meanwhile, John is reassigned to another story, while his arch-nemesis, a female reporter named Cat, steals the ape story out from under him. The apes are sold to a porn producer to be used in a reality TV show called Ape House.
John and Isabel individually move all over the place, at times annoyingly close to reconnecting. Amanda moves to L.A. to work as a script writer, while John is assigned to ‘Urban Warrior’ column, which provides a few laughs for the listener. Isabel is glued to the TV watching the apes and trying to figure out how to get them back. Eventually John relocates to L.A. to be closer to Amanda and takes a job with a tabloid that reassigns him to the ape story, which has since become the center of attention everywhere due to the apes nonstop sexual antics right on television (for bonobos, this is natural.)
It takes Isabel & John a long time to reconnect with each other, but when they finally do, the story (finally) kicks it up a notch. The last section of the story moves fast and the anticipation is high. I was very satisfied with the ending, although I wish that there had been more with the apes overall. That was the part I most enjoyed listening to, the apes interacting with each other and with the few humans around them. As I was writing, I realized that this book is by the same author as Water for Elephants, which I loved, of course! It is nice to see an author follow up a great book with another. Sarah Gruen knows how to write a realistic voice for animals. It doesn’t seem fake or Disney-fied when the animals ‘talk’ in her stories. It makes you look differently at your own pets or animals you see at the zoo, to wonder what they are thinking and feeling, even more than you normally would. Because I didn’t think this book was one I would like, judging by the cover only, I didn’t pay any attention to the author. Just goes to show that the old idiom of ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is true!
