Pet is a wonderful creation, somehow bearing echoes of so much from the biblical Book of Revelations to Predator! Pet was a piece of art, a painting of a creature done by Jam’s mother:Ī torso twisted all the way around, still furred, but the thick white was interrupted by a new bloodiness, intermittent streaks, as if the figure had made a mess while eating something.

She knew every sound the house made, and this was a new one, and it wasn’t the house making it this was just the house telling her. It was extraordinarily soft, barely a sound, even, but Jam knew it was there. In the waiting, she fell asleep herself, startling awake only when she heard the floorboards singing a song she hadn’t heard before. And Emezi plays with those modes of language: they describe the choices between signing and voicing, the intimacy created when Redemption’s family learn to sign to be able to talk to her, her ability to listen to the house and hear what it tells her, her silent thought conversations with with Pet. And, oddly, the second YA novel I’ve read recently where signing is a main character’s primary means of communicating: Frances Hardinge’s Deeplight was the other. So reading Pet and finding that Jam – a transgender girl – is also bilingual between sign language and voiced language is wonderful and touching. It comes out on some of the words she has trouble pronouncing, or when she is really tired or ill. She is having a lot of support and help and intervention and her spoken language has now caught up, but the sign language is still there. She was almost entirely reliant on sign language – which I had to try to teach myself in order to teach her – when she began school. My daughter – who is now six – has an unidentified speech and communication delay. Now I have to make an admission here: I am biased.

Jam and her best friend Redemption go on a hunt through Lucille to find and deal with a monster, aided by the hulking form of Pet. The story focuses on the town of Lucille in a unnamed country and, as so many Young Adult novels do, follows a young adult protagonist: Jam – one of the most vivid and alive characters I’ve come across recently. This is one of those books that leave you in absolute awe.

Pet emezi