From Publishers Weekly
This curious, slender debut—a "case history" complete with photographs—documents the appearance in a London-like city of Mr. Thundermug, a baboon who speaks perfect English, squats in a condemned apartment building with his wife and two children, and survives on foraged cockroaches and melon. The baboon's origins are unknown, but the unnamed narrator, a journalist, suggests that Mr. Thundermug may be linked to the mysteriously vanished zoologist, Dr. Alphonsus Rotz, whose immersion fieldwork with a baboon colony had led him to theorize, suggestively, about cross-breeding between humans and baboons. Mr. Thundermug is smart and articulate, but he can't read the eviction notices from the Housing Department. He sends his children to school and befriends their teacher, Miss Angela Young, who teaches him to read and write. After being harassed by the Housing Department, Mr. Thundermug is arrested for, among other things, cruelty to animals (his children sleep in the bathtub). He is vindicated, but his wife and children (none of whom can speak a human language) fare less well. Britisher Medvei offers a gently affecting and often funny allegory of the outsider, but his awkward framing of the "facts" gives the story a distance that diminishes its impact.
(Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Mr. Thundermug is a baboon–a baboon with the ability to convey his thoughts and feelings in flawless English. His quiet arrival, with his nonspeaking wife and children, in an unnamed Anglo-Asian city is at first unnoticed. Soon, however, the human inhabitants become aware of his presence and his implicit challenge to their beliefs about what is human and what is animal. Mr. Thundermug's social and legal problems slowly mount until he is arrested and brought to trial, where he pleads to be judged not as a human, or as an animal, but as an individual. The author writes in a detached, quasi-scientific style that underlines the inevitability of his hero's fate, while the black-and-white, slightly blurry lithographs that illustrate the story underscore Mr. Thundermug's anomalous status. Teens will appreciate the protagonist's desire to be treated as an individual and sympathize with his efforts to fit into a society whose conventions seem designed to exclude him. The provocative questions raised in this book make it a good choice for book discussion groups.–
Sandy Schmitz, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
