![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanguinity posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
50books_poc6. 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.
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.
