Mercy on These Teenage Chimps (review)

When Ronnie Gonzalez wakes up on his thirteenth birthday, he finds he has turned into a chimp. Okay, he's not really a chimp, but given the dorky simian effects of puberty (fuzz on his chin, arms hanging too long, ears sticking out, goofy grin), he finds the metaphor irresistible. When Ronnie and his best pal, fellow chimp Joey, get a detention for being late for school (they stopped to swing on the monkey bars), they find themselves assigned to the task of assisting the middle-school coach with a sports banquet. There Joey meets Jessica, a gymnast from another middle school, and he is immediately smitten. He follows their meeting with a very chimplike act of bravado—when her balloon escapes into the rafters of the gym, he scales the wall to valiantly rescue it for her—and he is subsequently dressed down by the coach right in front of the young lady. An embarrassed Joey then moves into his treehouse, so Ronnie plans to bring his friend down from the treetops by getting the coach to apologize and getting Jessica to visit Joey. There's slapstick aplenty in the account of Ronnie's adventures as he tries to achieve these goals, but woven throughout the narrative is the repeated exploration of what it means to become a teenager, delivered in the guise of the chimp metaphor with varying degrees of success. The boys tend to delve into reflections beyond the wisdom of their years ("I came to understand that I had matured"), which takes away from otherwise apt characterizations of early teenaged boys. The coming-of-age plot holds appeal, however, and the compression of the events—and the adolescence—into a few days' time makes for a quick, entertaining read.