Review: Half Brother by Kenneth Oppel

Published: January 2010

Synopsis: “From a Printz-Honor-winning author, an absorbing novel about a teen boy whose scientist parents take in a chimpanzee.

All happy families are alike. Ben Tomlin's unhappy family is unhappy in a very different way.

For thirteen years, Ben Tomlin was an only child. But all that changes when his mother brings home Zan--an eight-day-old chimpanzee. Ben's father, a renowned behavioral scientist, has uprooted the family to pursue his latest research project: a high-profile experiment to determine whether chimps can acquire advanced language skills. Ben's parents tell him to treat Zan like a little brother. Ben reluctantly agrees. At least now he's not the only one his father's going to scrutinize.

It isn't long before Ben is Zan's favorite, and Ben starts to see Zan as more than just an experiment. His father disagrees. Soon Ben is forced to make a critical choice between what he is told to believe and what he knows to be true--between obeying his father or protecting his brother from an unimaginable fate.”

Rating: ****

Set in Canada, Half Brother is the story of Zan a chimpanzee raised by Ben and his family as part of an experiment. The plot did take an unexpected turn for about the last third and went in a direction that I hadn’t been expecting.

Half Brother was very interesting from a Psychology point of view, as I studied Psychology at university and understood many of the concepts discussed and scientific language used. This made it clear that Kenneth Oppel had done his research into the area. Even the way the names of eminent Psychologists were casually dropped into the discussions between Ben’s Father and his students.

It wasn’t until 40 pages in that you discover the book is set in 1973, and personally I felt this could have been made more obvious in the description without it needing to be pointed out so bluntly.

I did find myself thinking about the newest Planet of the Apes film quite a lot, which I found a little off putting. But overall Half Brother contained a good mix of the normal growing up of a teenage boy, discovering girls and starting a new school with the more unusual element of raising a chimp as a human.