Pet

Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic Very nearly the novel of the year. It was sometimes hard to take seriously – oh no, a schoolgirl has lost her favourite pen! – and the ending, like Birnam Wood, was lurid and melodramatic, but Chidgey was across everything (plot, characters, setting, tension, deeper meanings), and the crazy energy of a writer on fire flickered on every page. From a review by Philip Matthews: “The year is 1984 and the setting is suburbia – a school, the shops, home. Twelve-year-old Justine lives with her father, and both are still grieving (‘The day we buried my mother, Lorraine Downes was crowned Miss Universe’). The middle-aged Justine narrates the story 30 years later, when her father is in a dementia unit, and she has a 12-year-old daughter herself. A trick of the memory produces unexpected flashbacks to 1984. Could her father’s new nurse, Sonia, actually be the mysterious and seductive Mrs Price, a teacher who mesmerised Justine all those years ago, along with almost everyone else she encountered?… Beyond the obvious 80s-era signifiers – what’s on TV, name checks for the Smurfs & Cabbage Patch Dolls – Chidgey gets something deeper about the ambiguity of the times, the less clear sense of what was appropriate & what was inappropriate.”teacher and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine's sense that something isn't quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Young as she is, Justine must decide where her loyalties lie. Set in New Zealand in the 1980s & probing themes of racism, misogyny and the oppressive reaches of Catholicism, Pet will take a rightful place next to other classic portraits of childhood betrayal: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Go-Between, Heavenly Creatures and Au Revoir Les Enfants among them.

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