Donald Owen

Harambe Donald Owen

Dr. Jenny Blundell is a Texas-based ophthalmologist with degrees from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has traveled the world and helped countless numbers of patients with their sight. But Jenny saw something as a 12-year-old in 1983 that has produced an extraordinary spiritual convergence in the present between herself, a photographer named Jeff, and a silverback gorilla called Harambe. The visions from 1983 are found in a series of sketches Jenny drew as a seventh-grader, when she became withdrawn from her family and classmates because of a horrific situation involving a well-respected teacher. Now the flashbacks from that episode have led Jenny to an animal she sketched thirty-three years earlier-even though the gorilla had not even been born. And the present-day realities have convinced Jenny that she is connected to Harambe in an eternal metempsychosis. Her suspicions are confirmed following the tragic killing of Harambe, when she meets the photographer and learns of his near-death experience in 1985-something she foreshadowed in her sketches in 1983-and his unique bond with Harambe. HARAMBE: A TRAGIC CORONATION is an 18,000-word novella that combines the first-person account of Harambe with the background story of Dr. Jenny Blundell, whose tale is shared through third-person vignettes. The novella also features the work and redemptive story of renowned wildlife photographer Jeff McCurry, who took thousands of pictures of Harambe while working at the Cincinnati Zoo. Many of McCurry's never-before seen photographs are included in the novella.