Akwaeke Emezi

How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist? She stumbled backwards, her eyes wide, as the figure started coming out of the canvas ... She tried to be brave. Well, she said, her hands only a little shaky, at least tell me what I should call you. ... Well, little girl, it replied, I suppose you can call me Pet. There are no more monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. With doting parents and a best friend named Redemption, Jam has grown up with this lesson all her life. But when she meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colours 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. In their riveting and timely young adult debut, acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi asks difficult questions about what choices a young person can make when the adults around them are in denial.

Cloey Yerger

“You know that’s what a lot of religion was, right? Just made-up things used to scare people so they could control us better.”

“Monsters don’t look like anything, doux-doux. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole problem.”

this book already has so many amazing quotes.

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

They don’t make evil like they used to.

   Politicians make policies putting children in cages and allow big companies to pour poison into our air and water. But they will say they are just doing it to support business, and that we’ll all reap the benefit of the poison eventually. There are people who scream their hatred to the skies, burn torches and mock those who are different from themselves. Even they have their excuses, usually something about protecting a “way of life.” There are no villains anymore.

Lindsay

(because, as the angels pointed out, you shouldn’t use a nation as a basis to choose which deaths you mourn; nations aren’t even real),

There is the unseen, waiting to be seen, existing only in the spaces we admit we do not see yet.

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.

Pet quotes

Join the club