13.8. Book #2, 2013

Walter Dean Myers's Monster is a movie script interrupted occasionally by diary entries--both written in a notebook during the the trial of his protagonist/narrator, a sixteen year old named Steven Harmon.  Steven is accused of serving as the lookout for a robbery of drugstore that ended in the murder of the drugstore owner.  Myers leaves Steven's guilt and involvement ambiguous to the end.  The novel's moral seems to lie in the potential consequences of a single choice.  The problem is, we never get to know just exactly what choice Steven did or didn't make and whether he was just an unfortunate victim of circumstances or what.

I'm a sucker for YA fiction.  I'm a double sucker for stories about inner city youths.  The Harlem setting is perhaps the best thing about this, and Steven as a wannabe film-maker is a good idea, but the novel written as film script just doesn't work for me.  Steven's character comes through in this style fairly well, especially, though because he occasionally interrupts his script to write a diary entry.  But the other characters quickly become indistinguishable from one another.  It might make a better movie; somebody should make it.

On the upside, I think Walter Dean Myers is a novelist worth reading, and I will read more of his books.  Because I'm also a sucker for stories about basketball players, and he has a couple of those, too.