Monster

published	May 1st 2001 by Amistad
binding	Paperback
isbn	0064407314 (isbn13: 9780064407311)
pages	288
literary awards	2000 Printz Award
description	"Monster" is what the prosecutor called 16-year-old Steve Harmon for his supposed role in the fatal shooting of a convenience-store owner. B...more [close] "Monster" is what the prosecutor called 16-year-old Steve Harmon for his supposed role in the fatal shooting of a convenience-store owner. But was Steve really the lookout who gave the "all clear" to the murderer, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? In this innovative novel by Walter Dean Myers, the reader becomes both juror and witness during the trial of Steve's life. To calm his nerves as he sits in the courtroom, aspiring filmmaker Steve chronicles the proceedings in movie script format. Interspersed throughout his screenplay are journal writings that provide insight into Steve's life before the murder and his feelings about being held in prison during the trial. "They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can't kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment." Myers, known for the inner-city classic Motown and Didi (first published in 1984), proves with Monster that he has kept up with both the struggles and the lingo of today's teens. Steve is an adolescent caught up in the violent circumstances of an adult world--a situation most teens can relate to on some level. Readers will no doubt be attracted to the novel's handwriting-style typeface, emphasis on dialogue, and fast-paced courtroom action. By weaving together Steve's journal entries and his script, Myers has given the first-person voice a new twist and added yet another worthy volume to his already admirable body of work. --Jennifer Hubert [close]
date added	01-31-07 edit book

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Jennifer rated it:

02/28/08

bookshelves: african-american-and-black, children-young-adult, minority-author-or-topic

Read in March, 2008

My first responses to Monster were disgust, repulsion, and fear of the penal system, as well as anger and frustration about the helplessness that I feel concerning reforming the penal system. As a friend who has been admitted to law school said this weekend while she was visiting (in a discussion independent of one about this novel), the penal system is broken, but we don’t necessarily know how to rectify it. This point was underscored by the recent findings that more than 1% of adult...more My first responses to Monster were disgust, repulsion, and fear of the penal system, as well as anger and frustration about the helplessness that I feel concerning reforming the penal system. As a friend who has been admitted to law school said this weekend while she was visiting (in a discussion independent of one about this novel), the penal system is broken, but we don’t necessarily know how to rectify it. This point was underscored by the recent findings that more than 1% of adults in the United States are in prison, and that although “one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group, the figure is one in nine." Suffice it to say, there is something wrong with these numbers; I don’t believe, and don’t wish to believe, that the over 2.3 million people in US jails are really “monsters." So, who are all these people? What drives them to commit crime (if they did indeed commit a crime), who sentences them to jail time, why do they keep ending up back in prisons after they’ve been released, and what can we, the public, do to improve the situation? As can be seen on the cover of my book, Walter Dean Myers’s Monster won the Coretta Scott King Award for non-violent social change. Definitely, Monster has changed my ideas about crime, low-income urban populations, social obstacles for African Americans, etc, and I hope that it would change others’ perceptions as well, but I’m still at a loss as to how we can take that increased understanding and promote social change. This is one of the main purposes of multicultural education, isn’t it? Hopefully, educating people about the realities and complexities of the penal system will ultimately lead to change.

One of the things that I think that this novel makes clear is that the majority of prisoners are not being rehabilitated in prison, which is one of the reasons for which many of the characters we encounter in Monster are repeat offenders, like Zinzi and Bobo. Rather, prisoners are subjected to perpetual fear, violence, and socio-emotional isolation. As Steve writes in his journal, “I go to bed every night terrified out of my mind. I have nightmares whenever I close my eyes. I am afraid to speak to these people in the jail with me. In the courtroom I am afraid of the judge. The guards terrify me” (Myers, p. 96). Somehow the system expects exposing offenders to fear, violence, and socio-emotional isolation to teach them to be upstanding citizens without addressing the greater socioeconomic, sociocultural, and sociohistorical reasons for which they were driven to crime in the first place, or eliminating the causes and desperation oftentimes spurring criminal activity. In general, we as an audience do not sympathize with James King, but we can comprehend his need to “get paid,” because, as Peaches says, “You can’t hardly even make it these days. They talking about cutting welfare, cutting Social Security, and anything else that makes life a little easy. They might as well bring back slavery times if you ask me” (Myers, p. 50). Although Peaches’ words may sound somewhat preachy, with Myer’s tones emerging as the implied author, her statements convey the idea that the problem of the high African-American crime rate involves complex reasons, including major influences of the past, like slavery, that have ripple effects in the present, none of which are resolved, resulting in an ugly social cycle. Other than failing to truly rehabilitate prisoners or address the race and class issues involved motivating crime, the prisoners’ experience may, on the contrary, contribute to their tendencies, or even drive them, to commit crime. For example, Steve journals that “violence in [jail] is always happening or just about ready to happen. I think these guys like it—they want it to be normal because that’s what they’re used to dealing with” (Myers, p. 144). The pervasive violence, and the seeming normalcy of it, undoubtedly remains with those who are eventually released, along with a sense of futility and helplessness that breeds more crime. In Steve’s case, the toll that jail takes on his psyche includes him questioning himself and whether or not his is guilty or not. At the beginning of the trial, Steve writes, “What did I do? What did I do? ....I didn’t do nothing!” (Myers, p. 115). Later, however, Steve says, “I hear myself thinking like all the other prisoners here, trying to convince myself that…the jury can’t find me guilty. We lie to ourselves here” (Myers, pp. 202-3). In his writing, not just in this quote, Myers communicates Steve’s growing doubt, not only in the justice system, but also in himself, because everyone, including the jurors and his lawyer look at him like his a monster, like he’s no different from all the other prisoners who did commit their crimes. To me, this is also a telling example of the way in which the mainstream culture’s perception skews a marginalized group’s perception of itself.
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