When asthma research accidentally leads to creation of talking animals, Man must finally confront the quest
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MONKEY SEE
by Walt Maguire
When asthma research accidentally leads to creation of talking animals, Man must finally confront the question avoided for centuries: How will this affect dinner parties? Ed the Talking Monkey is stuck between two worlds, with only one good pair of pants, living in a world he never made. Who isn’t?
When Ed moves out of his cage at the lab and finds an apartment convenient to public transportation, he has to face not only the stares of confused humans but the snobbiness of the more advanced experiments that follow him into the new social scene.
In the space of a few days, he must decide if his best interests lie with the humans, or with a group of the enhanced apes who think the humans are hogging all the best parking spaces at the malls. Meanwhile, he falls in love with a new young monkey at the lab, both of them unaware that one of the researchers has brought her in for an enhancement that is far beyond what any of them can imagine . . . or want.
This hilarious novel sprawls across the social landscape, trips over the moral ottoman, bangs its knee on the political hutch, and knocks over some cultural knickknacks on its way to a gargantuan climax that reassembles the known world into a map of life in all its forms, from the ridiculous to the broken, from monkey to ape to human and back again, from the selfish to the sacrificing, from sea to shining, lonely, moonlit sea.
It also offers a plethora of helpful, practical advice and how-to instructions on throwing inter-species dinner parties, parenting do’s and don’ts, conducting your own fiendish experiments, taunting caged monsters, and effective last words after the taunting turns out to be a mistake.
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