Pet

Pet

• Genre: Fiction; young adult fantasy/speculative fiction
• Originally Published: 2019
• Reading Level/Interest: Lexile 820L; grades 7-10
• Structure/Length: 12 chapters and epilogue; approx. 208 pages; approx. 5 hours, 33 minutes on audio
• Protagonist and Central Conflict: Jam, a 15-year-old Black transgender girl, lives in a utopian town where all the evils of the world—known as monsters—have been eliminated. However, when a creature named Pet emerges from one of her mother’s paintings, Jam learns that monsters come in many forms.
• Potential Sensitivity Issues: Sexual and physical abuse of a child, violence

Akwaeke Emezi, Author

• Bio: Born in 1987 in Umuahia, Nigeria; began writing stories at age five; moved to the US at age 16; earned MPA in international public policy from New York University; identifies as non-binary transgender and uses they/them/their pronouns; received a Global Arts Fund grant (2017) for their video art; their novel Freshwater is being adapted as a TV series; was honored as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35”
• Other Works: Freshwater (2018); The Death of Vivek Oji (2020); You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (2022); Bitter (2022)
• Awards: Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa (2017); National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (finalist; 2019); The Otherwise Award (2019); Ilube Nommo Award (2021); Stonewall Book Award for Nonfiction (2022) 

CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:

• Appearance Versus Reality
• The Importance of Remembering and the Dangers of Forgetting
• Binaries as Fiction

STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:

• Explore background information on utopias, false utopias, and dystopias to increase their engagement with and understanding of Pet.
• Read/study paired texts and other brief resources to deepen their understanding of themes related to Appearance Versus Reality, The Importance of Remembering and the Dangers of Forgetting, and Binaries as Fiction.
• Demonstrate their understanding of Pet’s “monster” motif by creating a visual argument linking the book’s definition of a “monster” to an institution in our own society.
• Analyze the significance of various elements of the novel, such as characterization, allusion, motif, and plot, and construct essay responses tying these to the novel’s meaning.