![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
Mar. 22nd, 2020 01:32 pmPet
4/5. So this is interesting. It's a novella about a girl* in a (future…?) city several generations after it was convulsed by a truth and reconciliation type reckoning regarding violence an particularly many kinds of intra-family harm. Into this society which believes itself now safe emerges a terrifying creature from a painting. He says he is here to hunt a monster. He means a child abuser, and what that means for this culture which has "defeated" that kind of evil is very complicated.
This is doing a lot of stuff in a small space and for a YA (or younger) audience. It's about teaching yourself to see what is in front of you, not the story you are told, and about appropriate ways to handle this kind of crime for a person and for a society. And it bent my brain a little around new corners -- yeah, I thought, but we don't have this story that we've beaten this. We have the opposite story, that it can't be beat, that it's just how people are. That's worse, in a way. But then I thought actually, no, we do have this story. Some people do, anyway. But it's smaller, and it goes like 'that can't happen in my family' and not 'that can't happen in my city.'
Also, I was initially startled to discover that the protagonists (who have a really beautiful friendship, btw) are in their late teens, as I had initially glossed them as much younger. Eleven, maybe? And I tried to figure out why they seemed so young, and I realized it's that they start this book not even knowing what abuse is. Like they need to go get the semi-forbidden pamphlets from the library to find out. And that's what made them seem too young for their age. And that is a really sad scale to be measuring on, but apparently it's what I was doing.
*She's actually a trans girl of color with a disability (selective mutism, though she also seems neurodiverse in a few other ways), if you want the whole tag set.
4/5. So this is interesting. It's a novella about a girl* in a (future…?) city several generations after it was convulsed by a truth and reconciliation type reckoning regarding violence an particularly many kinds of intra-family harm. Into this society which believes itself now safe emerges a terrifying creature from a painting. He says he is here to hunt a monster. He means a child abuser, and what that means for this culture which has "defeated" that kind of evil is very complicated.
This is doing a lot of stuff in a small space and for a YA (or younger) audience. It's about teaching yourself to see what is in front of you, not the story you are told, and about appropriate ways to handle this kind of crime for a person and for a society. And it bent my brain a little around new corners -- yeah, I thought, but we don't have this story that we've beaten this. We have the opposite story, that it can't be beat, that it's just how people are. That's worse, in a way. But then I thought actually, no, we do have this story. Some people do, anyway. But it's smaller, and it goes like 'that can't happen in my family' and not 'that can't happen in my city.'
Also, I was initially startled to discover that the protagonists (who have a really beautiful friendship, btw) are in their late teens, as I had initially glossed them as much younger. Eleven, maybe? And I tried to figure out why they seemed so young, and I realized it's that they start this book not even knowing what abuse is. Like they need to go get the semi-forbidden pamphlets from the library to find out. And that's what made them seem too young for their age. And that is a really sad scale to be measuring on, but apparently it's what I was doing.
*She's actually a trans girl of color with a disability (selective mutism, though she also seems neurodiverse in a few other ways), if you want the whole tag set.
