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Lucille is a city built by angels who fought a revolution to destroy the monsters and create a paradise. Angels fight for equality and peace and justice; monsters oppress people and hurt the innocent. Angels are activists and revolutionaries; monsters are abusers and oppressors.
Jam was born in Lucille, a child of angels. The children of Lucille never knew the war, only its fruits. In Lucille, guns are banned, all people are equal, and everyone is accepted. The monuments are of heroes and the victims of monsters. Lucille has no police or prisons, which were the things of monsters; the monsters themselves were sentenced to rehabilitation. There are no monsters in Lucille.
Jam, a Black trans girl who uses sign language, is happy in Lucille with her painter mom Bitter and her best friend Redemption. Until she accidentally sheds blood on a painting her mother is working on, and a frightening creature emerges. Pet is instantly recognizable to the reader, if not to Jam, as an angel - not a human activist, but the mythological kind. And Pet has come to Lucille to hunt a monster...
An ambitious, didactic children's novel with some elements that worked for me and some that really didn't. Pet is a fascinating character, Jam is very likeable, there's some gorgeous descriptive scenes, and Lucille is an intriguing setting. Attempts to imagine actual utopias always interest me, because it's such a difficult thing to pull off if you're trying for something other than a completely fake happyland in which everything is actually secretly terrible. (Lucille is not that.)
The things I did not like about the book are spoilery, other than the minor issue that Jam is said to be sixteen but if that hadn't been stated, I'd have assumed she was about eleven.
( Spoilers for the entire book, including the ending. )
This book won a ton of awards, so my opinion is definitely a minority one.
Jam was born in Lucille, a child of angels. The children of Lucille never knew the war, only its fruits. In Lucille, guns are banned, all people are equal, and everyone is accepted. The monuments are of heroes and the victims of monsters. Lucille has no police or prisons, which were the things of monsters; the monsters themselves were sentenced to rehabilitation. There are no monsters in Lucille.
Jam, a Black trans girl who uses sign language, is happy in Lucille with her painter mom Bitter and her best friend Redemption. Until she accidentally sheds blood on a painting her mother is working on, and a frightening creature emerges. Pet is instantly recognizable to the reader, if not to Jam, as an angel - not a human activist, but the mythological kind. And Pet has come to Lucille to hunt a monster...
An ambitious, didactic children's novel with some elements that worked for me and some that really didn't. Pet is a fascinating character, Jam is very likeable, there's some gorgeous descriptive scenes, and Lucille is an intriguing setting. Attempts to imagine actual utopias always interest me, because it's such a difficult thing to pull off if you're trying for something other than a completely fake happyland in which everything is actually secretly terrible. (Lucille is not that.)
The things I did not like about the book are spoilery, other than the minor issue that Jam is said to be sixteen but if that hadn't been stated, I'd have assumed she was about eleven.
( Spoilers for the entire book, including the ending. )
This book won a ton of awards, so my opinion is definitely a minority one.
