Monster

[sanguinity]

6. Walter Dean Myers, Monster.

I had my doubts going into this one. I've been massively disappointed in the last two Coretta Scott King Award books I've tried, and the narrative approach of this book initially seemed shallow and gimmicky to me. I was half-expecting to hate this book and then abandon it.

But. It works. It works very well. I'm quickly developing an intense love for Myers as an author.

This is the first-person story of Steve Harmon, a sixteen year-old boy on trial for conspiracy to murder -- the fall-out of a convenience store robbery gone wrong. Steve tells the story through his personal journal and a screenplay he's writing about the trial. And Steve is a juicily unreliable narrator. If you like that sort of thing. I adore it.

The journal is confessional and doubt-ridden. The screenplay is romanticized, blazoned with protests that this is a TRUE STORY. Both are rife with observations about lying: conflicting testimony and the institutional incentives to lie, obviously, but also the defensive stories one builds for oneself. Everyone lies in this story. Everyone elides the truth; everyone tells themselves fictions about why their fictions are okay. And everyone is riddled with doubts -- both about themselves, and about everyone else.

In keeping with everyone else in the book, Steve never tells us what actually happened that afternoon in the convenience store, not even if he was there. Nor does he give his own honest assessment of his guilt or innocence. But we can read between the lines, and the book becomes an extended meditation on guilt, innocence, doubt, stories, and lies.

Yum.

And I've got to say, as someone who can't write a good, meaningful, predicted-but-unpredictable ending myself, Myers did a brilliant job with the ending.

Yummity-yum-yum.

3. Alice Walker, The Color Purple

[helens78]

This is going to be a short review, as I'm recovering from food poisoning, of all things. Today I sat down and pretty much inhaled The Color Purple, which I hadn't read in several years, probably not since 2000 or so (when I discovered it didn't make the cross-country trip with me, and I immediately bought myself a new copy). I think I first read it in high school, back at a time when the lesbian theme confused me and the grounding sentiment of love as a force of change for the better didn't penetrate quite as deeply.

There's so much sorrow in this book that it almost feels flippant to take so many of the good themes away with me without paying respect to the incredible hardships each character in it survives, but I think part of the story is about surviving and finding, as the title indicates, the color purple in life's fields. This book is absolutely full of brilliant women of color, all radically different, and although the men of color in this book are frequently abusive and you want to hit them with a hammer, at least two of them also grow and learn and change over the course of the book, and there's a sensation that forgiveness is possible -- but that it needs to be earned through self-development, it can't just be bought with groveling. I love that this book has a way of saying that just saying the words isn't enough; what you do is important, too.