It's fitting that I read Monster a few weeks after Slam!, the book by the same author that I wrote about at the end of October, because there is a certain connection between the two books. It's not strictly in the sense that one book is a sequel to the other, but there are certain themes fully explored in Monster that were merely introduced in Slam!. I felt that reading the two books within a short enough time range to expose this loose connection was more rewarding than just reading one or the other as separate ideas; you know what I mean.
Monster by Walter Dean Meyers (August 2020)
This book is written as a screenplay, with notes detailing the distance of the camera shot or indicating the start of a voiceover. I felt the style put me at arm's length from the story in a way that I'm not accustomed with fiction; this isn't the kind of reading where it's possible to "lose yourself" in the imagined world. It's effective. By the end of Monster, I recognized that this isn't a story about Steve Harmon, or whether he's guilty of the murder charge for which he is on trial throughout the book - it's about whether I think someone is more likely to be guilty for the mere fact of being on trial.
TOA Rating: Three key grips out of four.
My book notes are here. The only thought that jumped out at me on my review reinforced my approval for the format. The screenplay style was a refreshing way to write this story, and it kept the reader away from jumping to any conclusions for the mere fact of noticing something predictable in the way Meyers told the story.
