50books_poc | The Beast, Walter Dean Myers, 8/50 (Reply)

The Beast, Walter Dean Myers, 8/50. This is a very careful, balanced novel – the metaphor throughout is that of the labyrinth, with the beast at its heart, but the danger is not so much the monster itself as the ever-present possibility of losing your way. Anthony Witherspoon comes back to Harlem after his first term at a Connecticut prep school, to find new gaps between himself and his friends there; of most concern is his girlfriend Gabi, who has become distant from both Spoon and the Gabi he remembers.

It would have been easy to tell this story as a standard problem novel and flatten the characters out to fit; what it is instead is a story not just about individuals with problems, but about the different communities they inhabit, and how some people manage to move between them, while others are lost. Nicely done.