Monster
Walter Dean Myers (1999)
“A sixteen-year-old on trial for murder rewrites his life as a screenplay — because the real version is too terrifying to face.”
At a Glance
Steve Harmon, a sixteen-year-old Black filmmaker from Harlem, stands trial as an accomplice to a drugstore robbery that ended in the owner's murder. Steve processes his terror by rewriting the trial as a movie screenplay, interspersed with raw journal entries that reveal the frightened teenager behind the performance. The prosecution calls Steve a 'monster'; his defense attorney struggles to humanize him; witnesses contradict each other; and the reader is never given certainty about Steve's role. He is acquitted, but his attorney flinches from his embrace, and the final pages show Steve still filming himself months later — searching the footage for the person the trial said he was.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Monster is one of the first young adult novels to use experimental format — the screenplay/journal hybrid — to explore the criminal justice system from a defendant's perspective. It won the first-ever Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature in 2000 and was a National Book Award finalist. It brought literary ambition and formal innovation to a genre that was not yet taken seriously as literature and opened the door for the wave of YA novels addressing race, justice, and systemic inequality that followed.
Diction Profile
Alternates between the formal, technical language of a screenplay (stage directions, camera angles, scene headings) and the raw, informal voice of a teenager's handwritten journal
Low in the screenplay sections (deliberately objective, visual) and moderate in the journal entries (simile and metaphor emerge when Steve attempts to describe emotional states the courtroom vocabulary cannot hold). The novel's most powerful figurative device is structural: the screenplay itself is a metaphor for Steve's attempt to direct his own narrative.