dystopias and made claims to support their arguments. They used an article on Common Lit called “ Why Teens Find the End of the World So Appealing” to introduce how other students described utopias vs.

During the first week, Clement engaged students in a discussion about dystopias and utopias to find a central theme and support it with relevant evidence. The five week unit that followed the book club consisted of topics ranging from the difference between dystopias and utopias to making inferences using text evidence to conversations about justice and defunding the police. Collectively, the book club loved the storyline and felt that it was relevant to current events, so Clement decided to create a unit on the book. The story explores identity and justice through a fictional examination of what it means to take down a monster in a world that doesn’t believe it exists. The book tells the story of Jam and Redemption, who meet Pet, a creature that comes to life to hunt a monster that lives in the shadows of Redemption’s home.

What would it look like? Zo Clement, special education teacher at Two Rivers Charter School in Washington, D.C., set out to answer this question with middle school students over the summer.Ĭlement, along with colleagues Nicole Clark and a number of other co-workers and students, coordinated a book club where they read Pet by Akwaeke Emezi. Though it may appear that monsters no longer exist in Lucille, Emezi is quick to tell the reader-from the very first line-that this is not the case.Imagine a world rooted in justice. There is a wariness in Bitter’s tone that speaks to her own experiences in the revolution, and to the difficulty in identifying who is or is not a monster. Bitter tells her daughter, “Monsters don’t look like anything, doux-doux. Though several characters openly tell Jam that she cannot trust things are as they appear, it takes first-hand experience for her to learn this. Emezi centers this theme throughout the narrative, teaching Jam, Redemption, and the reader alike that things are never quite what they seem. These labels evoke stereotypes about what monsters and angels look and act like, setting up Emezi’s exploration of a more complex notion of morality and Jam’s discovery that looks can be deceiving. They set up this theme from the beginning of the novel by opening with a discussion of the events of the revolution and the opposing factions of monsters and angels. Appearance versus reality is one of the central themes of Emezi’s Pet.