Bookverdict.com

Gr 8 Up—Fourteen-year-old Sophie rescues Otto, a young chimp, while spending the summer at her mother's bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo. When the president is assassinated and war breaks out, Sophie has a chance to return home to the United States but cannot bear to leave Otto. Their journey to safety takes them into the bonobo enclosure, but the real danger begins when they venture out and risk encountering rebel soldiers. Schrefer excels at imbuing the bonobos with individual personalities and en...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

Schrefer packs a wealth of incident -- too much, perhaps -- into a compelling survival story set in contemporary conflict-ridden Congo. When narrator Sophie, fourteen, arrives for her yearly visit to her Congolese mother's animal sanctuary, she becomes attached to a rescued baby bonobo she names Otto -- so much so that when the political situation destabilizes dangerously and she's scheduled to be airlifted back to Miami, she can't leave him behind. In one of the novel's early dramatic moments, she jumps out of the armored United Na...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

Endangered—a tense story of survival that is also a moving tale of human-animal friendship—has wide appeal. Sophie’s engaging, matter-of-fact tone is laced with wry commentary. (For example, her description of her childhood home is “The Democratic Republic of Congo: Where Even the Bullet Holes Have Bullet Holes.”) Yet she is also recklessly, touchingly compassionate, as demonstrated by her impulsive rescue of Otto in the novel’s opening chapter. The friction between these two poles of her personality leads to internal conflicts that are as compelling as the wider narrative. Eliot Schrefer trav...Log In or Sign Up to Read More