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A review by corinnekeener
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
3.0
We reviewed Pet for episode 55.5 of The Bookstore podcast which you can find wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm a grown now, so my opinions on Young Adult stuff should always be taken with a grain of salt. And I fully recognize that I've likely come down a little harder than necessary on books for younger folks.
Lots of great stuff in this one though:
1. Representation: Jam is trans, but the story isn't about her transition which feels like a huge step in literature in general, not just for books for kids. She also often speaks with sign language, which isn't even hard to include in books, but is not something we are given often enough.
2. This is not a THE FATE OF THE WORLD DEPENDS ON YOU, A 15 YEAR OLD IN LOVE WITH YOUR BEST FRIENDS OLDER BROTHER narrative: we've got fantasy, but many of the tropes that we've come to expect from books for this age group are being bucked. Nary a love triangle in sight. Rejoice!
3. Pet (the creature) is creepy and fascinating and utterly original.
4. Jam's parents are cool as hell and also love her.
What broke down for me was, well, some important plot themes. I know this is pretty standard for Sci-Fi/Fantasy, but I really, really do not like calling human people, even if they are bad and do the worst things, monsters. I get that it's a semantics issue, but dehumanizing even bad people opens everyone up to doing monstrous things. So I had a difficult time with the premise of needing to eradicate people for their actions - again, even if they were horrifying. I'm trying to be as non-spoilery here as possible, but I also found the end message of the novel to have weirdly mixed signals. There was a strong pull toward straight up ultra-violent vengeance, and I'd argue that it didn't totally skirt that even if there was a veneer of eventually having some sort of due process justice. This mixed with a mostly blank world that didn't give me a great sense of place, and narration that got bogged down with far too much standard YA "should I or shouldn't I?" made for a fairly unsatisfactory ending to this otherwise promising book.
I'm a grown now, so my opinions on Young Adult stuff should always be taken with a grain of salt. And I fully recognize that I've likely come down a little harder than necessary on books for younger folks.
Lots of great stuff in this one though:
1. Representation: Jam is trans, but the story isn't about her transition which feels like a huge step in literature in general, not just for books for kids. She also often speaks with sign language, which isn't even hard to include in books, but is not something we are given often enough.
2. This is not a THE FATE OF THE WORLD DEPENDS ON YOU, A 15 YEAR OLD IN LOVE WITH YOUR BEST FRIENDS OLDER BROTHER narrative: we've got fantasy, but many of the tropes that we've come to expect from books for this age group are being bucked. Nary a love triangle in sight. Rejoice!
3. Pet (the creature) is creepy and fascinating and utterly original.
4. Jam's parents are cool as hell and also love her.
What broke down for me was, well, some important plot themes. I know this is pretty standard for Sci-Fi/Fantasy, but I really, really do not like calling human people, even if they are bad and do the worst things, monsters. I get that it's a semantics issue, but dehumanizing even bad people opens everyone up to doing monstrous things. So I had a difficult time with the premise of needing to eradicate people for their actions - again, even if they were horrifying. I'm trying to be as non-spoilery here as possible, but I also found the end message of the novel to have weirdly mixed signals. There was a strong pull toward straight up ultra-violent vengeance, and I'd argue that it didn't totally skirt that even if there was a veneer of eventually having some sort of due process justice. This mixed with a mostly blank world that didn't give me a great sense of place, and narration that got bogged down with far too much standard YA "should I or shouldn't I?" made for a fairly unsatisfactory ending to this otherwise promising book.