Yolen paints just enough of a future New York City to provide a credible background for her study of Zena and for her exploration of what it would be like to be a human inside a monkey. Her teenagers are not much different from many modern ones.

The story makes the assumption that there will be some like Zena, that teenagers will ignore their parents, that fads will be important to youngsters, and that looking good will matter more to many like Zena than actually understanding what another person's character is. There is some risk to depicting future teenagers as being similar to modern ones; although hormones and instincts may not vary much from generation to generation, attitudes can change greatly. Yolen deals with this issue in her novelette "Lost Girls" (1997), in which the girls of Neverland have never known a society in which women speak...