With WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN, Kaitlyn Greenidge has created one of the most prescient and powerful works of historical fiction to be crafted this decade. One African American family is hired by a prominent research facility with a sick and familiar past to endeavor to teach a chimpanzee fluent sign language. Multigenerational, with perspectives woven tightly to craft an encompassing narrative that reveals exactly as much as it intends, the book is an undeniable masterpiece.

The Freeman family is composed of Charles, a down-to-earth professor; Laurel, a devoted sign language educator; their teenage daughter, Charlotte; and nine-year-old Callie. The family was selected ostensibly because Laurel has ensured that every member is fluent in sign language, and the Toneybee Institute seeks to immerse the chimp, Charlie, in the community structure of a family in order to best enable him to relate, and thus communicate. The plot can look simple from the surface and suggests satire. Indeed, the novel is fluidly readable and sharply satirical, but Greenidge’s authoritative critical voice underlies every lyrical moment.

A clear departure from many other novels of similar subject matter, WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN integrates and normalizes blackness, and the African American perspective as it relates to institutionalized racism, internalized prejudice, heteronormativity, activism and ableism. Even within an almost outlandish plot, Greenidge expertly explores these issues as they might manifest for young black families throughout the 1900s, utilizing the creativity and complexities of her narrative to highlight tragedy and justice.

"At once incisive satire, evocative bildungsroman, and a refreshingly authoritative, sorely needed stance on race and gender in America, WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN is a critical read and an absolute triumph."

The throughline voice of the novel belongs to Charlotte. A teenager teetering on the brink of young adulthood, Charlotte must confront the racist structures of our nation’s history, as well as our present. Greenidge, through Charlotte, takes readers through the devastating awakening of what it means to be a girl in this country, a black girl in this country, a black girl who comes to recognize she likes girls in this country. Charlotte is a profoundly authentic character, her internal dialogue precocious but never preachy, so the reader uncovers terrible truths about the realities of this world through her young but clever eyes. Greenidge’s writing sears, exploring the expanse of white supremacy as experienced by such a deeply felt character. Greenidge weaves Charlotte’s emerging profound racial realizations with her identity as a big sister, an eldest daughter, a hearing speaker of American Sign Language, a teenage girl in a race- and class-divided city, a black girl recognizing queerness, and a young person simply displaced from her home, navigating the challenges of growing up.

Though Charlotte takes prominence, all other voices here are equally tenderly authentic and immersive. The narrative of Nymphadora, a crucial figure in the book’s historical considerations, is one of the most heartbreaking, unique, relevant and profound storylines to be found in a novel spanning this era. Callie’s, Laurel’s and Charles’ arcs are all sensitively explored and come together along with other well-chosen voices to grant the novel unique richness. Greenidge translates the macrocosms of race, class, sexuality and gender in America through the exquisitely imagined experiences of her characters.

Consciously reverting academia’s anthropological gaze, sharply challenging the white supremacist approach of academic/subject, civilized/savage, center/margin, Greenidge exposes how historically we have pathologized and dehumanized nonwhite peoples and cultures, even when “meaning well,” even within recent decades. “History” is largely taught and understood to be white history, its tribulations and triumphs, whereas all other history of this country --- all other crucial perspectives of the very same timeframe that by no means exists in a vacuum --- are reduced to hyphens and the underfunded, overlooked basements of otherwise prominent institutions. What research exists is historical and still largely dominated by white voices that rarely endeavor to foreground anyone’s humanity except their own. Too rarely, even in the contemporary canon, are nonwhite voices given the opportunity to speak as living subject instead of exoticized object. Greenidge shifts that gaze and calls out this longstanding intricate injustice, through the perspectives of young black women who, like many others, discover that they are trapped within it.

Greenidge manages not only to balance the incisive sociopolitical with the sensitive and immersive qualities of a great novel, but also to participate in the revolution of revealing the true potency of literature. How many instructors and critics claim “there are no new stories, only new ways of telling them”? Greenidge scoffs at this reductive perspective, in crafting a narrative that is at once innovative and aware on many, many metalevels. This is what story can do. This is what happens when you give voice to those who have largely only been the subjects of speculation: an incredibly creative story, inextricable from its clear and gut-wrenching commentary. There are not many books in circulation that grant young women this acuity and authority, and so eloquently work to decolonize storytelling.

I began this book in the morning and couldn’t help but finish just after sundown, and I already know it will stay with me always. WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN forever changed how I approach story, raising my expectations of the capabilities of fiction. I would ache for more of this writing if the deliberate gaps in the story didn’t cleverly fill themselves, spaces she’s carefully crafted for the reader to recall history, imagine love and evoke loss. This being Greenidge’s literary debut, I eagerly await further writing from this masterful talent. At once incisive satire, evocative bildungsroman, and a refreshingly authoritative, sorely needed stance on race and gender in America, WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN is a critical read and an absolute triumph.