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A review by rereader33
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
3.0
I'm very conflicted on this novel. While I am thrilled that Emezi wrote about crime (specifically sexual violence) in the form of monsters and from the perspective of people wanting/choosing to forget monsters exist in order to live in ignorant bliss, for me this novel ended up being...good. It's incredibly quote-worthy, I'll give it that. But I don't have any other feelings for it aside from it being good. Here are some of my criticisms to explain why:
1. The characters were fine, but I wasn't particularly attached to any of them and while their reactions to certain events/situations were spot-on, they were almost TOO spot-on. As in, they reacted EXACTLY how you would imagine they would. While that's great for character consistency, it was almost too perfect and felt unnatural as a result.
2. The writing style was fine, but the overabundance of passive-voice and metaphors got old pretty fast. Make no mistake, some of the metaphors were hard hitting and well written, but they were used so much eventually they lost their charm.
3. While I loved the idea that people have "forgotten" monsters exist and Jam and Redemption have a hard rode ahead of them getting others to believe them, honestly that only REALLY comes into the equation towards the last maybe 50 pages of the book. I was kind of expecting it to be a reoccurring issue, but aside from Jam's info-dump about the society's past and present, Jam's parent's assuaging her fears about monsters not existing, and the last 50 pages, it only comes up as a thought but not an action. In fact, most of the time she doesn't bring up hunting monsters to people because she feels like they won't believe her. I would have liked to have SEEN people disprove her fears of monsters (aside from the instances previously mentioned) and have it more in the forefront rather than Jam CONSTANTLY holding back out of fear. Yes, it still plays to the same notion, but it's not as strong as SHOWING us why Jam won't be believed.
All of that being said, I do recommend this novel because it is dealing with an important message and the subject manner was handled very well. I will definitely be keeping my eye out for more books by this author; I may not have loved it, but I can't deny they re quite talented and I look forward to seeing what they write in the future.
1. The characters were fine, but I wasn't particularly attached to any of them and while their reactions to certain events/situations were spot-on, they were almost TOO spot-on. As in, they reacted EXACTLY how you would imagine they would. While that's great for character consistency, it was almost too perfect and felt unnatural as a result.
2. The writing style was fine, but the overabundance of passive-voice and metaphors got old pretty fast. Make no mistake, some of the metaphors were hard hitting and well written, but they were used so much eventually they lost their charm.
3. While I loved the idea that people have "forgotten" monsters exist and Jam and Redemption have a hard rode ahead of them getting others to believe them, honestly that only REALLY comes into the equation towards the last maybe 50 pages of the book. I was kind of expecting it to be a reoccurring issue, but aside from Jam's info-dump about the society's past and present, Jam's parent's assuaging her fears about monsters not existing, and the last 50 pages, it only comes up as a thought but not an action. In fact, most of the time she doesn't bring up hunting monsters to people because she feels like they won't believe her. I would have liked to have SEEN people disprove her fears of monsters (aside from the instances previously mentioned) and have it more in the forefront rather than Jam CONSTANTLY holding back out of fear. Yes, it still plays to the same notion, but it's not as strong as SHOWING us why Jam won't be believed.
All of that being said, I do recommend this novel because it is dealing with an important message and the subject manner was handled very well. I will definitely be keeping my eye out for more books by this author; I may not have loved it, but I can't deny they re quite talented and I look forward to seeing what they write in the future.