pet (akwaeke emezi): a review

 Pet (a review)

rating: ⭐⭐✨/5 (that's 2.5)

Pet is a fine book that would have been ten times better as a short story. If there exists a book where the phrase, "this could have been an email" is applicable, it is this book. It would have to be a long email. In any case, the concept of this book was super interesting, but the plot was sparse. Either more should have happened, or it should have been condensed.

This book is about a girl named Jam living in a utopian city where monsters (bad people) used to exist but don't anymore. Then, she meets a hunter/monster/sentient painting named Pet who is there to seek out and deal with a monster whose existence no one will acknowledge. 

If this all sounds interesting, it's because it is, at least, in theory. In practice, nothing happened in this book for at least 100 pages. Characters talk to each other and agonize. It is not action packed. There were maybe four plot points. I would recommend someone who is writing a book include more plot points, as a general rule.

Pet is essentially one big metaphor, so I wish the metaphor had been more elegantly incorporated and less heavy handed. And I cannot understand symbolism for the life of me, so perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about. But, as I understood it, the monsters represent oppression and inequality and other societal problems we experience today. Lucille (Jam's hometown) has allegedly eradicated monsters, but they refuse to see the monsters they haven't eradicated, the one Pet and Jam identify together. This book is an allegory for a trend that sometimes you see sometimes in the way certain people think about societal problems. A lot of the time, I hear about people saying that we've gotten rid of racism or misogyny or some other ill. Frequently, those people are in denial, seeing as we haven't gotten rid of any of those problems, and they decline to support strategies for actually getting rid of those things that still exist, despite what they might think. The message of this book is, essentially, it's impossible to solve problems by pretending they don't exist anymore. This is a cool message, but I didn't like how it was incorporated. If I can predict the theme when I've only finished half the book (which I could), the theme is too obvious. I don't want to understand the theme until the end. Ideally, I would like to not understand the theme at all and only have a vague sense that I'm missing something so then I'll google it. If a theme is easy for me to understand, it needs work, because (I will remind you) I'm really bad at themes. 

It is possible I'm just not the intended audience for Pet, and that's why I found it left something to be desired. It had strong middle grade vibes, and I don't read a lot of middle grade. Or short books. I don't love short books either. 

Easily the best part of Pet was Pet. Pet seems like such a cool guy. I would like to be its friend. Me and Pet? We would be besties. 

If you really, really love strange creatures coming out of paintings, don't mind weirdly slow paced books, and feel very strongly that it's important to actually acknowledge the problems that need to be solved, you may be the target audience for Pet, especially if you enjoy middle grade fiction. This is not a bad book, and I'm sure many people would enjoy it.