Review: Pet

Title: Pet

Author: Akwaeke Emezi

Genre: The author doesn’t like genre categorizations, and this book doesn’t really fit a particular genre. Utopian/Low Fantasy is my best guess, but Pet kinda defies categorization.

Trigger Warnings: Violence, child abuse, pedophilia (implied), incest (implied), blood, sexual assault (mention), body horror, medical content (mentions), adultism. Highlight to read spoilers.

Back Cover:

There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life.

But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and a drop of Jam’s blood, she must reconsider what she’s been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption’s house.

Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question–How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?

Review:

This is a weird little book with a lot of big things to say. The genre absolutely defies categorization. It’s set somewhere in the future, where some sort of rebellion got rid of all the “monsters” – police, billionaires, racists, bigots, anyone who wouldn’t support the social justice utopia that the town of Lucille (or possibly the entire country?) has become.

This story is driven somewhat by plot and mostly by themes. It’s short (5.5 hours in audiobook, about 200 pages per The StoryGraph), and doesn’t devote much of that space to characterization or worldbuilding. When it comes to characters, it focuses more on the dynamics and relationships between them than giving any of the individuals too much depth. I didn’t mind that very much, though. The characters here are more of a vehicle to experience the story than anything, and I liked seeing the different dynamics between Jam’s family (just her, her mom, and her dad) and Redemption’s family (three parents, a little brother, and aunts and uncles all over the place). Jam and Redemption have one of the healthiest friendships I’ve seen in fiction, and I love that Jam is plot-savvy about the kinds of things that tend to hurt friendships in stories.

The plot is short and straightforward. There are no twists, there are no surprises, and I called the identity of the monster Pet was hunting about halfway through. But it’s engaging enough, and the theme is what matters. This book asks “How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?” but it also asks, more subtly, “If we get rid of all the evil in society, how will we put systems in place to make sure it doesn’t appear again?” It’s a story about two friends and an inhuman creature that crawled out of a painting hunting a monster, yes, but it’s also a story about how a one-off rebellion isn’t the final solution, how people who did very good things can also do evil things, and how society needs to have systems in place to stop the evil acts no matter who did them.

The most interesting part of this book to me was how the utopian city of Lucille seemed like something that is theoretically possible in real life, but there are the little details that keep throwing the perfectly realistic world just a bit off-kilter. Sure, there is the terrifying creature of feathers and claws that emerges from a painting, but there is also Jam’s ability to feel what’s happening in her house – who is where, their mood, what they’re doing – with no cue except feeling through the floorboards. Those kinds of fantastical elements don’t fit into the otherwise-plausible world, and I’m not sure what they mean thematically. Maybe that a utopia like Lucille is only possible in fantasy and creating something similar in reality would require more maintenance and vigilance to keep the “monsters” from coming back?

You could probably make an argument that the themes in this book are heavy-handed. They kind of are, but I think it works. I enjoyed it as a story, and I appreciated the wise things it had to say. To me, Pet has the vibe of a book you read in an English class for its important commentary on social issues, but one of those rare English class books that you also happen to enjoy. It’s the kind of book that wins awards and gets lauded for being both a good story and an Important Book. Balancing entertainment appeal and being Important is a difficult act, but I think Pet mostly managed it. It’s definitely worth reading – if you’re not into creatures crawling out of paintings, at least for the philosophical questions it poses.

Review: Utopia

Title: Utopia

Author: Thomas More

Genre: Classic

Trigger Warnings: Sexism, war (mentions), death (mentions), racism (mild), colonization, physical abuse, slavery, ableism, classism, adultism

Back Cover:

In this political work written in 1516, Utopia is the name given by Sir Thomas More to an imaginary island. Book I of Utopia, a dialogue, presents a perceptive analysis of contemporary social, economic, and moral ills in England. Book II is a narrative describing a country run according to the ideals of the English humanists, where poverty, crime, injustice, and other ills do not exist. Locating his island in the New World, More bestowed it with everything to support a perfectly organized and happy people.

The name of this fictitious place, Utopia, coined by More, passed into general usage and has been applied to all such ideal fictions, fantasies, and blueprints for the future, including works by Rabelais, Francis Bacon, Samuel Butler, and several by H. G. Wells, including his A Modern Utopia.

Review:

This isn’t anything that a modern reader would consider a novel. There is no plot, no structure, and no characters unless you count the frame story from part one. This is, in essence, a description of what Thomas More thinks a perfect society should be, framed as a monologue from a traveler named Rafael telling Thomas about such a society. (Yes, the author put himself as himself into the novel – although I don’t think that was as unusual in 1516 as it is now.)

The word “utopia” has come from this book to mean a perfect society, but the Utopia in this book is not any place I’d want to live. To my modern sensibilities, it sounds more like a Puritan hellscape than anything. (Or proto-Puritan, I suppose, since the Puritan movement didn’t officially form until the 1560s.)

A few highlights:

• All people are perfectly equal, except that old men are served by everyone, women serve men, and children serve adults.
• Everyone wears the exact same clothing, which is shapeless and the color of undyed wool. Jewelry and decoration of any kind are considered childish.
• Families with too many children have some of them taken away and given to families that have too few.
• All religions are tolerated as long as they’re an acceptable form of Christianity, and not believing in the right things is punishable by slavery. (The Utopians were not Christian before Rafael showed up to their island, but of course they gladly converted when he told them about Jesus.)
• Twice a month, women and children have to kneel before their husband/father and confess everything they’ve done wrong.
• Potential spouses are presented to each other naked before agreeing to marry because “you wouldn’t buy a horse without examining it fully to check for defects, so why would you marry a wife when all you’ve seen is her face and hands?”
• Work is done efficiently so everyone has plenty of leisure time to spend in self-improvement. The only allowed leisure activities are reading and playing games like chess that improve your mind.

That said, there are some ideas from this society that I do like. One of the foundational ideas is what modern theory would call post-scarcity: if everyone stopped worrying about accumulating wealth and we got rid of all the societal roles (like nobility) that don’t produce anything useful, there would be more than enough. Nobody would have to bother with anything like money or hoarding wealth or goods, because why bother taking 18 bolts of cloth and stuffing them into your home when you can just take the one that you need now and get another one when you need it? I also like the idea of rotating who had to work on the farms outside the city and who lived in the city and giving everyone a chance to try any trade they wanted before deciding on one to make sure nobody got stuck with work they hated.

This book is definitely the product of its time. There was a conversation full of political commentary before the monologue started, and I definitely didn’t grasp the full nuance of it (likely due to never having lived in a monarchy). I’m sure many of the aspects of Utopia were meant to bring attention to specific social issues in 1516 – possibly relating to war since there was a heavy emphasis on “the Utopians hate war but if they have to here’s how they do it” – but I don’t know enough about the historical context to grasp what Thomas was trying to say. It was definitely an interesting book, but I think knowing the social and historical context it was written in would make it feel like something more than “here’s how Puritans think the world should be.”