Our Closest Relatives
Ape introduces young readers to gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and other great apes, exploring how they live, how closely they’re related to humans, and why so many species are under threat. It’s part of Martin Jenkins’s long run of natural history titles for Walker Books.
Decades of Nonfiction for Children
Jenkins has written more than fifty books, most nonfiction built around natural history and conservation themes, and his catalogue has earned a strong reputation among reviewers and librarians, including favorable coverage from Kirkus Reviews and Reading Rockets.
What the Book Covers
Ape moves through the great apes one at a time, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, favoring specific behavior over general facts: how an orangutan mother carries and teaches her young, how chimpanzee troops negotiate social rank, how bonobos resolve conflict, how a gorilla’s size hides a mostly calm temperament. Vicky White’s paintings work almost like portraits, giving each animal an individual presence rather than treating them as interchangeable examples. Backmatter adds range maps and population figures, and the book closes on the pressures, habitat loss and hunting chief among them, that put all four groups at risk.
How It Was Received
Ape earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly, was named a Book Sense Children’s Pick, and appears on the New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing. Bank Street College named it a Best Children’s Book of the Year, and it won the ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award, a prize specifically recognizing books that promote humane treatment of animals.
A Note on the Title
The word “ape” in the title is doing precise work: apes and monkeys are different groups, and the book is specifically about the great apes, animals without tails, larger-bodied, and far more closely related to humans than any monkey. That distinction matters for the conservation argument the book is making, since all four great ape groups it covers are currently threatened, unlike most monkey species.