Ape House | D

After a writer comes out with one stunningly successful book, it is very tempting to hope for more of the same in her future work, especially if the book being discussed is Water for Elephants — a New York Times Bestseller, Alex Award winner and soon-to-be movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson in the lead roles. Unfortunately, for Sara Gruen fans, her past masterpiece entirely eclipses her latest novel Ape House.

Gruen drew inspiration from her visit to the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where she was overwhelmed by the bonobo apes' ability to hold a conversation in American Sign Language. In Ape House, she explores the narrowing of the gap between humans and our genetic relatives, the apes, through nonverbal communication.

Like a typical action thriller, the story opens with a terrible bombing of the fictional Great Ape Language Lab organized by an animal activist group. Dr. Isabel Duncan, the keeper, barely survives and when she awakes, the apes are gone — sold by the university to a pornographer.

The loveable primates quickly become the stars of the story, as they adapt to living in the wild of human society. Sadly the supporting human characters just as quickly fall flat. Phlegmatic love plots, akin to those of an unripe Nora Roberts novel and tabloid drama litter the rest of the plot line, making for an uninspired series of events in which the apes — the heart of the story — all but disappear.

What happened to the richness, depth and gripping tension that defined her first novel? Where was the monkey muse when Gruen was writing the manuscript? Throughout her career, Gruen has become famous for adeptly expressing the human and animal bond, but Ape House is just a cookie cutter novel, full of forgettable characters and a wanting plot line. It hardly deserves a trip to the library, let alone the bookstore.