Lucy and Bonbon
by Don LePan
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Pub Date May 01 2022 | Archive Date Jun 30 2022
Guernica Editions | MiroLand
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Description
Are we ready to accept a human-ape hybrid in our midst? Exploring the no-man’s land between the human and the non-human.
What if humans were able to reproduce with other great apes? What would the hybrid offspring look like? Act like? Think like? And how would humans respond? Would such creatures be allowed to live among us? Or would they be put under a microscope in a zoo or research facility? Lucinda Gerson is an outspoken, free-spirited working-class single mother. Lively and unpredictable, she’s the sort of person you might call “one of a kind.” Her child Bonbon is quite literally one of a kind. When Lucinda spends the money she has inherited from an uncle on a trip to visit her anthropologist sister in the Congo, she comes back pregnant. Lucy and Bonbon is the story of mother and child, and of the controversy that swirls around them over the course of the child’s first fourteen years. It is a story of freedom and captivity, of love and friendship, of borders and of border crossings, and of what it means to be a human animal.
Advance Praise
“Lucy and Bonbon is a remarkable achievement. Don LePan raises extremely important ethical and philosophical issues, and weaves them into an intriguing story with a page-turning finish.”
Peter Singer, Princeton University / University of Melbourne; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and The Most Good You Can Do
“I greatly enjoyed Lucy and Bonbon. At first something of a novel of ideas, it turns into an exciting escape drama, with a sting in the tail, a surprise look into the unknown future. It leaves the reader wanting a sequel!”
Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford; author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion
“… a fascinating exploration of ideas. The prose is a joy to read and the two main characters are unforgettable. In Bonbon, the ‘hybrid,’ LePan has created a voice that is intelligent, self-aware, empathetic and observant, and the fact that he views humanity from both the inside and outside offers an amazing perspective. Lucy and Bonbon is compulsively readable as it builds to its extraordinary and thought-provoking conclusion.”
Deborah Willis, author of The Dark and Other Love Stories and Vanishing
“Lucy and Bonbon provocatively pushes against legal definitions of personhood, the notion of scientific objectivity, and the concept of freedom in its exploration of the permeability of the species divide. As Ashley Rouleau explains to Bonbon as they flee from the Coldwater Institute in Canada to the United States, “a border is, like, an edge. An end and a beginning. A between.” LePan’s novel challenges us to occupy the liminal space of the border between human and non-human animal, between newly elected President Trump’s United States and Canada, between reason and emotion, and, most importantly, between what is and what might be possible.”
Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, author of Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment and The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781771837187 |
| PRICE | $17.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 100 |
