By also using a removed narrator-Sophie is an adult on the verge of marriage as she recalls the ordeal-Schrefer manages to deliver a vital, nuanced portrait of a girl who learns the dichotomy of being a compassionate human. This identity issue later becomes symbolic of the crisis she can’t be part of the cities or the jungle, she has neither human nor animal home. At the beginning of the story she bemoans that she doesn’t fit into either cultural world. Take, for example, the fact that Sophie is half Italian and half Congolese. While Schrefer uses a fast-paced plot and increasing danger to make YA storytelling look deceptively easy, he moves beyond it at the same time to deliver a multilayered experience. Eliot Schrefer and Oshwe at a Bonobo sanctuary outside of Kinshasa Terrorists try to kill her and starving citizens will poach Bonobos, so they flee to the jungle in their struggle to survive. Schrefer sends Sophie on a pulse pounding journey to find her mother-who travelled to another refuge before the violence started-while becoming a mother in her own right to the orphan Bonobo she rescued. We are immediately introduced to Sophie Biyoya-Ciardulli, the sulking fifteen-year-old narrator on her way to spend the summer with her mother in the Democratic Republic of Congo, “where even the bullet holes have bullet holes.” She impulsively buys an abused juvenile Bonobo from a roadside hawker and brings him to her mother’s Bonobo sanctuary outside the capital city of Kinshasa, but just as she settles into sanctuary life a terrorist siege takes over the country. This book is a serious page turner.Ī veteran of the genre, Schrefer flawlessly constructs all the pillars of YA. I probably should have noticed this title when it was released in 2012, or at the very least when it earned recognition from the ALA, NPR, or became a National Book Award finalist, so it was with some chagrin that I checked it out and sat down to read. Other than two genre novels, this was the only hit and it felt, well, a little too obvious. I stumbled on Elliot Schrefer’s young adult novel Endangered while searching my library’s catalog for fiction about endangered species.
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