The Bookish Mindset

Overview:

Title: Pet
Author: Akwaeke Emezi
Published: 2019
Genre: YA, Fantasy
Themes: Morals, good vs evil

One sentence summary: A book that questions good and evil and how well evil hides itself.

One sentence review: I mean wow, what a book.

Review:

Jam has grown up in a new Lucille, a Lucille that is free of monsters, the angels made sure of that. But why then is PET here to hunt for a monster?

I picked up PET in my local library as I’m on a mission to work through Akwaeke Emezi’s back list and wow did this live up to their high standards.

The world they built is incredibly clever and my mind is just a little bit blown if I’m honest. It’s a cleverly posed narrative about good vs. evil and what can happen if we continue to assume everything is alright.

I think it would be too easy to spoil this book by talking about the plot anymore since it’s only a short one, so here are a few of my favourite quotes:

“Good and innocent, they not the same thing; they don’t wear the same face.”

“Also, the problem is, when you think you’ve been without monsters for so long, sometimes you forget what they look like, what they sound like, no matter how much remembering your education urges you to do.. But forgetting is dangerous. Forgetting is how the monsters come back.”

“How do we know we’re doing the right thing?” she asked. “There is no right thing”, Pet replied. “There is only the thing that needs to be done.”

If reading more is something that you’re looking at doing this year then should check my reading challenge out here! Read nine books from nine prompts over the first six months of the year and be entered into a draw to win a bundle of bookish goodies.

If you’d like to get yourself a copy, you can support local bookshops while doing so on Bookshop.org with this link here.

If you like what you’ve read and would like to access more content, I’d love if you could take a look at my patreon and consider supporting my content on there too.

And don’t forget to check out my other blogs and reviews – you can find books with similar themes in the same folder link below, or click back onto blogs to see the whole offering.

Last updated 31/01/2025