Mr. Thundermug

November 6, 2006
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.

May 1, 2007
Adult/High School-Mr. Thundermug is a baboona 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 2007 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2007
The title character is a baboon with the power of speech, much to the amazement of those he encounters. As bewildered as the humans are, Mr. Thudermug's loquaciousness does not prevent bull-headed bureaucrats from ousting the baboon and his nonverbal family from the condemned building in which they are squatting. In a guffaw-inducing exchange with the worst kind of civil servant, Mr. Thundermug glibly maneuvers his family's retention of their home, proving logically that the Housing Council has no right to evict them, but he freely admits to breaking other laws by not always sending his baboon children to the public school. The amusing and frustrating transactions between baboon and society attain urban-legend status as the narrator tries to track an actual witness to any one of numerous accounts of the baboon's verbal exploits. This quickly paced morality tale will give readers something to ponder: If animals could speak, would they retain the same rights as humans? No conclusions are drawn here, only the quaint talk of one baboon and his experiences with a world befuddled by his talkative presence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)