Guernica Editions
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Lucy and Bonbon
Guernica Editions (MiroLand), Spring 2022
244 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771837187
ISBN10: 1771837187
English
$20.00 Canada, $17.95 US, £11.95 UK
What if humans were able to reproduce with other great apes? What would the hybrid offspring look like? Act like? Think like? And how would humans respond? Would such creatures be allowed to live among us? Or would they be put under a microscope in a zoo or research facility? Lucinda Gerson is an outspoken, free-spirited working-class single mother. Lively and unpredictable, she's the sort of person you might call “one of a kind.” Her child Bonbon is quite literally one of a kind. When Lucinda spends the money she has inherited from an uncle on a trip to visit her anthropologist sister in the Congo, she comes back pregnant. Lucy and Bonbon is the story of mother and child, and of the controversy that swirls around them over the course of the child's first fourteen years. It is a story of freedom and captivity, of love and friendship, of borders and of border crossings, and of what it means to be a human animal.
It's a pretty short moment, isn't it? I mean, what mothers have with their children. Fathers too, if the fathers ever show up, ha ha. And then for a moment I thought of Bei, and it wasn't funny, I just hoped he was all right, that his life--I don't know what-all I hoped, but I hoped it hard.
“Lucy and Bonbon provocatively pushes against legal definitions of personhood, the notion of scientific objectivity, and the concept of freedom in its exploration of the permeability of the species divide. As Ashley Rouleau explains to Bonbon as they flee from the Coldwater Institute in Canada to the United States, “a border is, like, an edge. An end and a beginning. A between.” LePan’s novel challenges us to occupy the liminal space of the border between human and non-human animal, between newly elected President Trump’s United States and Canada, between reason and emotion, and, most importantly, between what is and what might be possible.”
Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, author of Wilderness into Civilized Shapes and The Vegan Studies Project
“Lucy and Bonbon is a remarkable achievement. Don LePan raises extremely important ethical and philosophical issues, and weaves them into an intriguing story with a page-turning finish.”
Peter Singer, Princeton University / University of Melbourne; author of Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save
“… a fascinating exploration of ideas. The prose is a joy to read and the two main characters are unforgettable. In Bonbon, the ‘hybrid,’ LePan has created a voice that is intelligent, self-aware, empathetic and observant, and the fact that he views humanity from both the inside and outside offers an amazing perspective. Lucy and Bonbon is compulsively readable as it builds to its extraordinary and thought-provoking conclusion.”
Deborah Willis, author of The Dark and Other Love Stories and Vanishing
“I greatly enjoyed Lucy and Bonbon. At first something of a novel of ideas, it turns into an exciting escape drama, with a sting in the tail, a surprise look into the unknown future. It leaves the reader wanting a sequel!”
Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford; author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion
"Never before have I read a book that is at once so riveting and so profoundly morally poignant. [Lucy and Bonbon] cuts deeply into the arrogance of human exceptionalism, and presses us to confront our lingering superiority complex."
Jonathan Balcombe, New York Times bestselling author of What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins and Second Natur
Reviews
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Lucy and Bonbon by Don LePan
The BC Review - May 4, 2022
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https://miramichireader.ca/2022/04/lucy-and-bonbon-by-don-lepan/
The Miramichi Reader - April 18, 2022
Books by Don LePan
