Wow, this is how all YA should be written! I do think that the standard of young adult novels only gets higher every year, with lots of authors tackling important themes and topics better than most adult novelists. I read Pet as part of the #queerblackathon because of Jesse's @bowtiesandbooks rec video, and a great review from Seji @theartisangeek last year, both of which I will link to in my stories so you can watch them too!

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Pet only took me maybe two hours to read, so you have no excuses for not picking up this beautiful little book. Jam is a trans girl who lives in Lucille, a place where there are no monsters anymore - or at least, that's what the children are taught. But when one of Jam's mother's paintings comes to life because of a drop of Jam's blood, she realises that it's there for a reason: to hunt a monster. And that monster happens to live at her best friend Redemption's house.

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This book could not be more timely. Just read this quote:

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'It was no small thing to try to restructure a society, to find the pus boiling away under the scabs, to peel back the hardened flesh to let it out. Jam had heard stories of how horrifying it had been to see the truth of how many monsters there were in Lucille - the public ones, the private ones, the chameleons, the freestyle solitary ones, the charismatic smiling ones.'

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If that doesn't reflect perfectly how insidiously racism and racists are embedded in our society then I don't know what does.

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This was my first book by Emezi, and it made me extremely excited to read their books for adults! The writing is stunning, a lot of the time it read like poetry - especially the names of the characters! Redemption, Whisper, Bitter, Aloe, Malachite - I LOVED. If this is Emezi's YA (which cuts no corners, kids deserve excellent literature too), then I'm sure I'll be even more blown away by Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji, which I will be preordering before its August release in the UK!