Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Pet, by Akwaeke Emezi

Pet is my second book by Akwaeke Emezi and while I did find it to be an engaging read it didn’t quite hit me the way as their ​​The Death of Vivek Oji did. I had a similar experience when I read All Our Hidden Gifts, Caroline O’Donoghue’s foray into the MG/YA genre. I couldn’t help but feel that at times the tone and content of these two books didn’t always quite mesh well together.
Pet opens with some pages of exposition which paint a rather vague dystopian picture. Apparently, monsters (what kind of monsters? i’m not sure) are no longer a thing and have been banished or annihilated by badass looking angels (when? how? not sure). Jam, our protagonist, is a child who lives in Lucille. She has loving parents and a best-friend named Redemption (all of their names are like this…why? not sure). Her mother is an artist and one-day Jam bleeds on one of her paintings. Her blood brings forth the clawed and monstrous-looking creature her mother had depicted in said painting. This creature, Pet, is a monster hunter who speaks in a painfully ‘i’m not human’ way that brought to mind Yoda from Star Wars. Apparently, this (scary things popping out of paintings) has happened before but we don’t really learn the details of why/when/how. Do monster-hunters always emerge from paintings? What happens if no one paints anything? Do they exist before the painting in another dimension? How are the painters able to depict them if they never saw them? How often does this happen? I do not know. Anyhow, Pet is adamant that a monster is ‘hiding’ in Redemption’s house. Jam, worried for Redemption and his family, decides that she will try to help Pet in its hunt, even if it means lying to the ones she loves the most. The final section of the story gave me Avatar: The Last Airbender Book 3 vibes, but instead of Aang angsting over what to do with Fire Lord Ozai, we have Jam worrying about what to do with the monster. Pet seems intent on destroying the monster but Jam is adamant that this is never the solution. Like many other middle-grade books Pet highlights how parents and adults often dismiss and or overlook children. They may not do this intentionally but they simply do not pay attention or listen to them.
In Pet, there is also an attempt at discussing evil and goodness. While Emezi does seem to challenge strict binaries (such as good/bad), they ultimately do seem to go for a Dinsey-esque vision of ‘bad’ people. Even their portrayal of abuse and abusers struck me as relatively ‘safe’.
I found the tone of the story often a bit too simplistic. At times I didn’t wholly believe in Jam’s responses to certain things and Pet made for a rather inconsistent character (on the one hand it knows that Jam is ‘spiralling’ and tries to help her, on the other, it seems not to recognise or care for human ‘emotions’). Certain things were a bit too dumbed down, and I would have loved to see more nuance in the author’s portrayal of ‘monsters’. The world-building was very vague and one of the book’s weakest aspects.
I did appreciate the casual trans rep and the platonic relationship between Jam & Redemption.
Still, if you are in your early teens you might find this to be a more compelling read than I did. I, for one, think that I’ll stick to the author’s adult fiction.

my rating: ★★★☆☆

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