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We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou
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Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Pet is here to hunt a monster.

Are you brave enough to look?

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, and the answer to the question-How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?

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.

TITLE: Pet
AUTHOR: Akwaeke Emezi
PUBLISHER: Make Me A World
YEAR: 2019
LENGTH: 208 pages
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: Highly

Queer Rep Summary: Trans Main Character(s).

PET is about abuse and the shape of justice, because removing monsters requires vigilance. The MC has space to make the wrong decision sometimes and then figure out the aftermath without failure being catastrophic. She has a very strong sense of herself which helps ground the story as she's trying to figure out how to deal with the disturbing disruption to her life which is the main plot. The plot is about child abuse and how a community deals with abusers and enablers, but the text itself keeps most descriptions vague except for a few places where it's very important to be clear about what's going on. I like the way the "no monsters" setup is subverted and examined without making the narrator into a liar. Overall this is a short and cathartic book about communication and justice, with a vibrant MC and really great characterization of secondary and minor characters. 

CW for blood, violence, sexual assault (backstory), child abuse (not depicted).

BTB 2021 Reading Challenge (QAOC)

Bookshop Affiliate Buy Link

A young Black girl stands in yellow pajamas superimposed over a cartoonish aerial view of a town laid out in a grid.


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