Ben Tomlin, an average thirteen-year-old boy, isn't so sure about his father's new experiment. Dr. Tomlin, Ben's father, a well-known scientist in the field of behavioral sciences, has suddenly moved his family to a new university in a new city to undertake a new scientific study, which means a lot of changes for our average thirteen-year-old boy . Dealing with moving to a new school and trying to make new friends is no easy task, but unfortunately for Ben, an additional burden is placed on him as he is forced to deal with the family's newest addition, a baby chimpanzee. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In this behavioral study, Dr. Tomlin is trying to find out whether or not chimpanzees can learn sign language and hold conversations with humans, their closest relatives, and how best for the baby chimpanzee to learn to speak like a human being is to be raised as one. A story of science, animal rights, morality and coming-of-age story, Half Brother is a surprising mix of all these themes and will definitely captivate young audiences in this revealing drama. In the book Half-Brother, our main character, Ben Tomlin, is the thirteen-year-old son of Dr. Tomlin, a behavioral scientist who conducts a seemingly revolutionary experiment to see if chimpanzees can converse with humans through the use of chimpanzee language. signs. The test subject, who is named Zan, was torn from his mother's arms and was chosen by the Tomlins to be raised and educated as a human. Of course nothing started out smooth and dandy. Ben's initial thought towards Ben was jealousy because the chimpanzee attracted his parents' attention. As time passes, however, he begins to quickly get closer to him, even giving him his name, Zan, which is half of "Tarzan". The experiment is successful at first and Ben begins to love Zan and even tries to love him like a brother. The two main characters featured in this story would be Ben and Zan. Ben is a thirteen year old boy whose perspective or views are represented throughout the book, Step Brother. Although he was born between two people in the doctoral field, he is a surprisingly slow learner whose grades are clearly not the highest. Because of this, his relationship with his father is complicated to say the least. That doesn't mean he isn't willing to have compassion like in Zan's case. Like, he's willing to risk anything for Zan, even if it means jeopardizing his father's image and whatnot. Zan is the subject on which it is experimented throughout the story. Although it was Ben's father, Dr. Tomlin, who suggested the idea for the experiment, the people who primarily teach Zan American Sign Language are Ben and his mother. During his time with the Tomlins, his relationship with Ben developed quickly and strongly, which made it difficult for him to separate from Ben. The moment for Zan to leave comes much sooner than Ben would have thought, and honestly much sooner than even any reader would have imagined. Zan suddenly leaves Tomlin's house and travels to a research facility in Nevada when funding for the experiment runs out. This was the area where the story started to go downhill for me. Not because it was sad, but because I felt that Zan's exclusion was too harsh and uneven. Almost as if the author had to stop him because he couldn't finish the book in time. I also wished the author, Kenneth Oppel, would make Ben's voice a.