Walter Dean Myers’ Monster

From back of book:”Steve Harmon’s black. He’s in jail, maybe forever. He’s on trial for murder. He’s sixteen years old”

Clever how they mention the whole “Steve Harmon’s black” thing first in their brief description of the novel. That was one of the aspects of the book that bothered me. I think it polarizes a race by saying things like, “She didn’t want to testify against so and so because he’s black” or “He’s black so juries are even harder on him.” That’s a whole different issue, but I’d say it’s a huge part of the book. Frankly, I thought the book was terrible. I’m not one to read YA novels, and that might be why I hated it. The whole “screen play” format was really irritating. Myers would use small sections to explain what was going on, like “Cut to: some person doing some thing”, and they were hard to understand so I had to figure what was going on through small clues, and dialogue. The plot was boring, you could basically figure out what was going to happen after being 20 pages into the book. Honestly, there was nothing I liked about it. I’m still trying to figure out whether Steve Harmon had anything to do with the murder or not, and maybe the jury was wrong, or what. Hmph.