Category: Read This Book

Welcome to the first edition of the Read This Book! This is a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, back list titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s Read This Book recommendation is Pet by Akwaeke Emezi.

(Content warnings: child abuse)

“Angels can look like many things. So can monsters.”

Welcome to Lucille, where there are no more monsters. Jam and her best friend Redemption grew up hearing about how the angels got rid of the monsters before they were born, so they can live in a safe, accepting, diverse society. Lucille lives by the words written by the poet Gwendolyn Brooks (from her poem “Paul Robeson”):

“…we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.”

In many ways, Lucille is a true utopia: Jam is a selectively mute trans teen girl who has always found love and acceptance, even from a young age. Her best friend Redemption’s family includes three parents, one who uses they/them pronouns. Life is happy, and monsters are a thing of the past, something Jam wonders about but does not fear. But one day, Jam’s mother paints a monstrous creature and when Jam accidentally spills her blood on the artwork, the creature comes to life. Its name is Pet, and it tells Jam that there is a monster in Lucille that they must hunt.

Jam is understandably confused, and reluctant to help—especially when Pet reveals that the monster is lurking in Redemption’s house. To Jam and Redemption’s understanding, monsters are the billionaires who destroyed the environment, the crooked police who abused their power, the criminals who took advantage of the weak. None of those things exist in Redemption’s house. But as much as she doesn’t want to believe Pet, and as painful as it is to tell Redemption about Pet and the existence of the monster, Pet doesn’t let Jam shirk this duty. Even when Jam’s parents would turn a blind eye, Pet makes it clear that Jam and Redemption must hunt this monster. The monster must be dealt with, and quickly.

Pet is a slim, strange novel that feels deceptively simple when you first begin reading. It feels like a light fable, but with each paragraph Emezi is skillfully building a highly suspenseful story about the monsters that can lurk in plain sight, and the obligation that we have to look out for others–especially the most vulnerable. With lyrical writing, they also paint an alluring and intriguing world that is inclusive and accepting in an unfussy way. People in Lucille exist on a spectrum of gender, sexuality, ability, and mobility, and all of these differences are acknowledged and included. Pet is a book that will make you think, make you gasp, and keep you on the edge of your (metaphorical) seat. I believe adults will be utterly absorbed, but it’s also an excellent novel for teens and upper middle grade readers (the book’s target audience) to talk about community, abuse, and how appearances can be deceiving. I believe this book is, at its core, about the dangers of not recognizing a monster (or evil) when you see it, and the imperative we have to look upon our world with clear eyes, open hearts, and say, “We are each other’s harvest, we are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

It’s no wonder that Pet was a National Book Award finalist for 2019—this book pulls no punches. Emezi knows exactly when to pull away and when to get in close, no matter how much throwing the light on a monster may scare you. And even though Pet didn’t take the award, you simply must read this book.

Bonus: Pet makes an excellent audiobook! It’s narrated by Christopher Myers, founder of Pet’s publisher, the imprint Make Me a World (a division of Random House). Myers brings energy, compassion, and an urgency to this book that is deeply compelling.

Happy reading, book nerds! See you next week.

Tirzah

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Thrillers are having a moment. Twisty, suspenseful stories about mistaken identities, missing girls, unreliable narrators, and domestic bliss that isn’t what it seems are all over the bestseller charts. You know the books I mean: everything from The Girl on the Train to Ruth Ware’s latest, The Turn of the Key. This style of crime fiction is often called a domestic thriller, which can best be described as a “psychological thriller that focuses on interpersonal relationships,” often those between husbands and wives or parents and children.

The domestic thriller has a particular focus on and association with women (perhaps that’s why the publishing industry seems to have saddled an entire sub-genre with such an eyeroll-inducing name). Many bestselling thriller authors are women. Many of the narrators of these novels are women, too. And many of the problems in these novels are those which concern women in particular: domestic violence and other forms of violence against women, including abduction and rape; husbands who aren’t who they claim to be; troublesome neighbours; gaslighting and emotional abuse; the demands of motherhood.

At CrimeReads, thriller writer Jessica Barry (author of Freefall) explores the ties women have to this genre, arguing that for women, thrillers can be heroic narratives. “The narrative is not—or at least not only, and not always—that bad things happen to women,” she writes. “It’s that women have the ability to survive when bad things happen.” And at Bustle, Mary Widdicks calls thrillers “a safe space” where women can encounter their fears in a controlled environment. Both are compelling arguments. If one half of the population regularly experiences violence and abuse, it only makes sense that that group of people would be drawn to stories where characters overcome similar behaviour or are offered some form of justice.

The thing is, women’s love for domestic thrillers isn’t anything new. Erin Kelly points outthat marriage-gone-bad narratives, a staple of the genre, are as old as the Ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. And the domestic thriller as we know it today was born in the 19th century, with the rise of sensation fiction.

Sensation fiction was a popular genre of fiction that peaked in the 1860s. It was a fusion of genres including Gothic fiction, romance, and realist fiction; that fusion was a significant reason for its widespread popularity. Sensation fiction blended the juiciest, most sensational romantic and Gothic plot lines—think secret babies, kidnapping, poisoned spouses, and adultery, like Victorian-era soap operas. These topics all sound fantastic, but when they appear in familiar domestic settings, like a cozy family parlour, they take on a newly thrilling, threatening quality.

Sensation novels were meant to provoke intense emotion in readers, and boy did Victorian readers love that blend of crime and everyday life. Realism was already a popular form of fiction at the time, as seen in Dickens’s novels inspired by his experiences growing up in a workhouse (Little Dorrit) and by a real-life court case that dragged on for years (Bleak House). Sensation novels took the most salacious newspaper headlines, those about divorces, crimes, and murder cases, and made them as familiar to middle-class readers—the people who had money to spend on books and libraries—as a family sitting down to tea. Both domestic thrillers and sensation fiction have that ripped-from-the-headlines quality that we pretend we don’t love.

Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone, The Woman in White, and other books now considered to be classics, is probably the most well-known sensation fiction author. But, and this may not surprise you, it was a genre primarily associated with women. Authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood were hugely popular. Even the Brontës borrowed from sensation fiction. Braddon was known for Lady Audley’s Secret, a novel about, in the words of Matthew Sweet, “a murderously ambitious Pre-Raphaelite beauty who secures a fortune by shoving her husband down the garden well.” Published in 1862, it was one of the first sensation novels. Braddon’s books, and those by other sensation fiction authors, were very popular with female readers.

Serious Literary Critics, of course, were no fans of the sensation novel, and many worried that young women in particular would be corrupted by reading these tales of murder and mayhem. As you probably already know, Victorian society was strictly divided along gender lines, with men responsible for the public sphere and women confined to a private, domestic world. It’s no surprise that stories about women murdering their husbands, committing bigamy, having secret babies, and stealing jewels were looked upon with suspicion by critics and excitement by female readers. These novels threatened the very fabric of orderly middle-class Victorian life by allowing women to feel emotions and imagine situations far beyond their daily experiences.

Fast forward to 2019, and we have our own version of sensation fiction: the domestic thriller. Domestic thrillers aren’t quite as threatening to the fabric of our society. To me, they seem to reflect the worst bits of it back at us with a few distortions, like a funhouse mirror. Domestic thrillers can be an escape, but I think they’re also something of a punishment: look how bad we’ve let things get.

What domestic thrillers and sensation fiction both do so well is portray the crimes and betrayals experienced by women, from major violence to the everyday indignity of having a man belittle your opinion. Like female characters in Victorian sensation fiction, female protagonists in domestic thrillers may be unreliable; they may drink too much or withdraw from public life; they may have suspicions no one believes. They have a tragic incident in their pasts or a secret they can’t reveal. They definitely have a man in their life gaslighting them.

All of these are things that happen in real life. We think they’re just newspaper headlines, but they’re happening all around us behind closed doors. Domestic thrillers and sensation fiction—both shine light on a world that we think can’t touch us. It’s been there all along.