Pet (Awaeke Emezi)

Pet
Awaeke Emezi
Make Me a World
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Literary Fiction/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Once upon a time, the world was full of monsters: not goblins or demons or storybook beasts, but the kind who walk on two legs. They could be anywhere, and look like anything, and they spread their greed and hate and evil far and wide, until the people finally had enough. It took decades, and many things were done which are no longer spoken of, but at last the revolution succeeded. They dismantled the prisons and abolished the firearms that turned public places into potential massacre zones. They turned to proactive intervention rather than reactive punishment, embracing difference and diversity over bigotry and hatred. And the angels, the heroes of that era, still watch over the better world they created in the town of Lucille, one in which the public can at last breathe a sigh of relief, because the monsters are all gone.
At least, that's what the children are taught in school, and what their parents tell them.
Jam did not mean to bleed on her mother's latest unfinished painting. She just wanted to look at it, to ponder the strange, beastly figure of smoke and feathers and horns that had emerged on the canvas. When she accidentally cuts herself, a few drops of her blood somehow wake the creature, or rather open a portal to some strange other place through which it can step into her world. It tells her she can call it Pet, and declares that it is a hunter of monsters, summoned to this world because it is needed.
Surely it must be mistaken; Mom and Dad and all her teachers tell her that the monsters are gone and never coming back to Lucille. But it is quite insistent, and Jam begins to wonder. Would she even know what a monster looked like if she saw one? And could it be possible that one has been hiding in plain sight right in front of her and she just didn't know how to see?

REVIEW: Any book that opens with a prologue explaining its themes to the reader before they can have a chance to read and discover them for themselves is waving a red flag warning that the coming story is not going to tell me a tale but sell me a message. But I'd already given up on another audiobook for my workday and had a very specific window of time to fill, and this looked intriguing. Thus, I waded in.
The early parts have a lot of promise. It takes place in an unspecified place and time, either near future or alternate timeline, where the promise of progressive revolution has borne fruit. All the "monsters" who have warped society for too long, from the child predators to the overpowered monsters who have seized the reins of power at the highest echelons to strangle justice and turn a profit off poisoning the land and murdering countless people, have been cast down, the militarization of police and packing of prisons has ended, and even religious extremism has been nipped, with religion itself only vaguely discussed in school (though the public libraries are well stocked and well staffed and will offer anything to anyone who wishes to learn). Jam is transgender, her parents are different races, and her best friend/potential boyfriend Redemption's extended family includes a parental throuple. This is a future that's as close to an accepting, peaceful utopia as possible, though of course it's not perfect... and, as the book shows, it threatens to become a victim of its own success. Though Jam's and Redemption's parents, and of course the elder "angels" who fought for this society, remember the time before and the many guises of the monsters they overthrew, children no longer understand just how easy it is for terrible people to hide in plain sight. They don't know the warning signs, and when anyone does dare suggest that perhaps there are still dangers in the world, their elders refuse to acknowledge that monsters could ever return; after all, they sacrificed so much and did "hard things" to end the terrors, and they refuse to admit that this is not a battle that can be decisively won and forgotten about. When Jam accidentally wakes the being "Pet" (which may or may not be an angel), she, too, does not want to believe - especially when it tells her that the monster it is here to hunt is in Redemption's home. Her own parents deny the possibility to vehemently that Jam convinces herself that Pet is mistaken, or even lying. Yet Pet insists, while she grows conflicted, then denies any chance of trouble, only Pet insists....
You may sense a bit of repetition in the previous bits. While the early parts of the tale have a certain literary, surreal element - the peculiar being emerging from the painting with its slightly archaic and poetic speech, the way her parents react to its arrival, even the way neurodivergent and selectively mute Jam interacts with the world as much through energy and vibration as verbal or signed communication - it starts getting a little heavy-handed with its themes, and soon sinks into a holding pattern that keeps things stuck for far too long, where Pet insists that it needs to hunt and Jam needs to help it figure out where the monster is, while Jam refuses to take the threat seriously and doesn't really believe monsters are real anymore, only for Pet to once again repeat itself with some variant of "the hunt is the hunt" and "see the unseen" or some other entirely useless phrase or sentiment that fails to convince Jam to step up to a plate that needs to be stepped up to if the story's going to move forward, yet which she dithers about for far, far too long... and even when she does, the tale bogs down more with too much filler and not enough progress. At some point, it stopped being intriguing and started being tiresomely preachy and repetitious, before (slowly) building up to a (slow) confrontation and (slow) resolution, underlain with a religious subtext that felt a little out of place. By the end, my skull was fairly ringing from the sledgehammer blows driving its message home, plus few things irk me more than a sermon mislabeled as a story.

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