Rachel in Love
By Pat Murphy
ISBN# 2940015954432
Author’s website: http://www.brazenhussies.net/murphy/
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Caro
Spoilers!
Synopsis:
Rachel has the mind of a teenage girl, but the body and the innocent heart of a young chimp. Sometimes when she looks at her gnarled brown fingers, they seem alien, wrong, out of place. She remembers having small, pale, delicate hands with painted fingernails. Memories lie upon memories, layers upon layers, like the sedimentary rocks of the desert buttes.
Aaron Jacobs, the man Rachel calls father, was a neurologist who discovered how to capture the electrical pattern of a living brain’s thoughts and memories. When his daughter died unexpectedly, the grieving father imposed the electrical pattern of the girl’s brain on a young chimp, creating Rachel, a chimp he recognizes as his daughter.
Rachel knows that she is a real girl – but when Aaron Jacobs dies, she must make her way in a world that treats her as nothing but an animal.
Review:
I remember, very blurry, as a child watching a movie where chimps were being exposed to radiation through top secret experiments. At the end, they are saved by two human friends who help them escape by using a military plane. And, for those who know what Fullmetal Alchemist is, I’m sure you remember an emotional episode where Ed and Alphonse come across a chimera that was once a little girl they had met before. All of these, even more reason to read this. Rachel in Love by author Pat Murphy is a story whose plot goes somewhat along those lines, revealing an amazing little adventure which I can’t describe with the proper words how good it was to read.
This is one of those stories that deserve a happy ending after all the difficulties the characters go through and for a moment I was afraid that the author wouldn’t give her leading role one. Throughout these few pages, we feel sympathy for Rachel who is taken away from what she has come to know as her home, into a world of humans that don’t seem to understand her plea that she is a real girl like them.
I became very fond of this story, not just because of the author playing with the idea of working with the brain and its memories, but also because of the transformation of Rachel’s personality of a child watching movies and reading bedtime stories to a mature female embracing the cruel reality of the world.
Among those bad moments, the author also gives Rachel happy ones that for a moment, in my opinion, make the reader think that she will be driven away from her goal, when she becomes friends with the night janitor by communicating with ASL you see her get used to the secret comfortable life of a chimp at a lab at night, giving the impression that she wants to stay there after all.
But, where do we find the “love” in Rachel in Love? Everywhere if you read well 🙂 The author brings back the theory of the brain and its memories making me remember that I once heard that smells activate memories. After being so much with the janitor, Rachel mentions that he reminds her of her father, of tobacco and whiskey, a reason why she later feels attracted to him. While Johnson, a male chimp, falls for the new girl just to be ignored.
My favorite part of this little chimp adventure, was definitely the ending, I couldn’t have asked for a better one. This is where you realize the maturity Rachel has come to acknowledge, finally leaving behind the teenage girl and both chimp and human, growing up.
If you’re in the mood for something refreshing and full of love, in its many ways, then this is the book for you. And if not, it won’t hurt you to give it a try. With a story as amazing as this, it won’t even take you less than an hour to enjoy a good read.
