Publishers Weekly
06/10/2024
In the uplifting latest from Roorbach (Lucky Turtle), a girl and a monkey forge a life-altering friendship. The narrator, Beep, a restless squirrel monkey in a Costa Rican rainforest, leaves his family and sets out to find a mate, climbing his way toward a smoking volcano. There, he meets a girl named Inga, who’s visiting with her family from New York City. She feeds him pineapple before stowing him in her bag. The two communicate via grunts and agree that Inga will smuggle Beep home to Manhattan. Beep gets his footing there after chatting with squirrels in Central Park, dodging dogs, and, together with Inga, emancipating the animals on display at the Bronx Zoo. Amid the commotion, they take shelter behind the robes of two Buddhist monks, who impart advice to them about the value of loving and respecting all animals. As Beep’s relationship with Inga deepens, he learns more about himself and the world around him and resumes his quest to meet a mate. Roorbach maintains a steady supply of entertaining wordplay, as Beep phonetically reproduces what he overhears (“ladies and gentleman” comes through as “labies and genitalmen”), and the portrayal of Beep and Inga’s friendship convinces. Animal lovers will savor this. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (July)
From the Publisher
"BEEP is a wonder, both monkey and novel, our hero's curious, questing soul, the ebullient brilliance of Roorbach’s prose. Wildly beautiful, funny, moving, entrancing, and hopeful, this is a story for our times, a ray of warm and generous light, a stern warning, a triumph of storytelling."—Kate Christensen, author of Welcome Home, Stranger
"With a lexicon worthy of Anthony Burgess, our small but mighty hero is quick to recognize the perils facing our fragile world. But Beep is a love story most of all, told with the poetry of a pure heart."—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North
"BEEP is a work of glorious strangeness, invention, and hope. In this, Bill Roorbach's most original book yet, his simian hero makes monkeys of us all."—Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There and co-author of Mad Honey
"Hilarious and heartfelt in equal parts, and Beep’s slow uptake of human ways is a revelation. Both the finely tuned rhythm of the humor and the crackpot vocabulary put me in mind of George Saunders—I love the kind of tweaked language that reminds me continuously as I read of the blind trust we put in words to reflect the world as it is, rather than creating it as we would like it to be.”—Kate Colby, author of Reverse Engineer and I Mean
“How do I love Beep? Let me count the ways. A novel for a new era, with a monkey serving as transmitter of the knowledge our species desperately needs. Full of heart, brilliantly written, with the wild Roorbachian humor and grace we've come to expect. Delight in Beep, Monkey. Hold tight.” —Sarah Braunstein, author of Bad Animals
“Roorbach masterfully imbues his simian narrator with a voice full of innocence and trepidation… [He] expertly balances the whimsical with the philosophical as Beep describes the world with a sense of wonder… An inspiring quest tale and imaginative bildungsroman that celebrates the natural world.”—Booklist
“In this good-natured fantasy… well paced and exciting… Roorbach’s vision of a world despoiled by human waste and carelessness is grimly plausible, and his hope for a better future is no doubt shared by all.”—Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
2024-05-17
A monkey goes on a journey to save the planet.
The novel is narrated by Beep, a squirrel monkey living in what we eventually learn is Costa Rica. We know from the beginning, however, that his troupe is aware of a world beyond its rainforest that contains other monkeys, and that a prophecy promises “a monkey one day will come along whose accidental courage will reunite us, even save the world.” That monkey turns out to be Beep in this good-natured fantasy, which launches when he leaves his troupe to find a mate. Shortly after, he meets up with Inga, an 11-year-old girl who befriends Beep when he tries to grab some pineapple from a table outside her family’s vacation home in Costa Rica. Soon he’s unwittingly in Inga’s “noopsook” on a “roarbird” bound for New York. Beep’s rendering of various “you-men” words is initially distracting, especially since his narration implausibly uses others like “tween” and “inanimate” with no problem. The language becomes less jarring and the pace picks up in NYC when Beep and Inga take a trip to the “Bronzoo.” An extended scene in which they evade the “Greenies” (aka guards) and start opening cages is well paced and exciting, with the tension ratcheted up as the police arrive and tranquilizer guns are deployed against the growing horde of freed animals. Roorbach depicts animals communicating across species, and a minority of humans led by Inga who can understand them, as a means to lead his plot toward a feel-good denouement. Not every reader will be charmed by Beep’s mannered voice or persuaded even fictionally by his odyssey, but Roorbach’s vision of a world despoiled by human waste and carelessness is grimly plausible, and his hope for a better future is no doubt shared by all.
Pleasant enough, for those who buy the concept of delving into an animal’s thought process.
