The story’s setting varies with the life progression of the narrator, Rosemary Cooke. Beginning with her childhood years spent in Bloomington, Indiana (and where Rosemary visits her parents while at college), the story moves to Rosemary’s college years in Davis, California, then ends in Vermillion, South Dakota, where Rosemary lives with her mother after her father dies.

Rosemary’s early family environment is shaped by her parents’ passion for scientific knowledge; her father is a rational, and cynical towards fields such as psychoanalysis which he perceives to be unscientific. After the abrupt removal from the family of a chimpanzee with whom Rosemary was raised for five years, and whom the family believed would be with them for life, the family environment becomes a place of trauma from which its members move on in their separate ways.

Lowell’s character develops into one with a sense of justice, particularly when it comes to animal abuse, and invites into the narrative wider issues concerning the morality and ethics of using animals for biomedical research and entertainment that were gaining prominence at the time.

Animal studies, particularly primate research, had already been credited with significant advances in understanding the treatment of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and autism. But with this came the question of what was considered useful and what was considered non-useful experimentation. By the 1980s and 1990s, the animal rights movement had come out from the fringes of society and was gaining mainstream currency among professionals including lawyers, physicians, psychologists and veterinarians, who were rethinking their views towards animals and the value of their use in research for the benefit of humans. It is about this time that Lowell is involved in animal activism with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF; a non-fictional animal rights movement). The criminalisation he experiences through his direct actions of animal rescue and involvement working with the ALF mirrors real-life events in the US in that in 2003, the FBI labelled the ALF a terrorist organisation.