Jennie: A Novel

Douglas Preston’s Jennie, based on the real story of the chimpanzee who inspired Curious George, is the celebrated novel that was made into the award-winning Disney television film The Jennie Project . Translated into many languages, Jennie became a worldwide bestselling sensation.

On a research trip to West Africa, Dr. Hugo Archibald of the Boston Museum of Natural History encounters an orphaned baby chimpanzee. Archibald decides to bring the ape, whom he names Jennie, back to Boston and raise her alongside his own two young children as a kind of scientific experiment.

Jennie captures the hearts of everyone she encounters. She believes herself to be a human being. She does almost everything a human child can, from riding a tricycle to fighting over the television with her siblings to communicating in American Sign Language.

Told from shifting points of view of those closest to Jennie, this heartwarming and bittersweet novel forces us to take a closer look at the species that shares 98 percent of our DNA and ask ourselves the What does it really mean to be human?