Pet

Unable to put down Catherine Chidgey's PET, I struggled to sleep last night as I thought long and hard about the "conventions" of society. If you're of a similar age to this reviewer, you'll have probably lived through the experience of the manic house clean, the wearing of "the good clothes" and the general heightened buzz that went with contact with social elites - the doctors, banks managers, religious leaders and teachers that we were told to look up to. So many of those supposed "leaders" turning out to have been people that systematically used their power and influence to corrupt, abuse and generally conflate their own positions. In PET Chidgey sets up a scenario that looks deep into the selective blindness of a teaching profession that refused to acknowledge the wrongs that they could see building before them, and the way that the questioning is left to a young girl, struggling with the death of her mother from breast cancer, what that could mean for her own future as she hurtles into puberty, and all the usual pressures that come with the heightened hormone hit of that age.

Full Review: www.austcrimefiction.org/review/pet-catherine-chidgey