'Uglies' by Scott Westerfeld

Westerfeld, Scott. Uglies. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005. Print.

Photo by: L. Propes

If your image of a dystopian novel or film conjures up images of Blade Runner -- grimy, crumbling cities -- Uglies is quite a departure from the stereotypical dystopia.  Set in a distant future where hoverboards are a thing of reality and the cities run solely on solar power, Uglies is the first in a series of four novels that examine the perceptions of beauty, government control, and the role of the individual in society.

Tally lives in Uglyville, the area of the city where all teenagers live from the age of 12 until their 16th birthday, whereupon they will be taken to the hospital and undergo a brutal surgery that will not only make them "pretty", but radically change their bodies.  (The descriptions of the surgery are not for the faint of heart.  It's not terribly graphic, but if watching old episodes of ER make you squeamish, you might want to skim those lines in the book.)  Tally's best friend Peris had the surgery on his birthday, three months ago and now lives in New Pretty Town, a glittering community where the new Pretties live after their surgery.  Tally misses Peris, and sneaks into New Pretty Town to see him.  Needless to say, she isn't supposed to be there.  Tally manages to leave without being caught by the authorities for being out of bounds and runs into Shay, another Ugly waiting to become Pretty.  Shay is different from Tally: she is content with her looks, isn't waiting with bated breath to become a Pretty, and has plans to run away to a mystical place called the Smoke where people can choose to keep their original face and maintain control over their lives.

When Shay runs away just days before her 16th birthday, the consequences fall hard on Tally, who is brought into Special Circumstances where the sinister Dr. Cable offers her an ultimatum: find the Smoke and lead Special Circumstances to its location, or stay an Ugly forever.  To Tally, who has dreamed of nothing more than becoming a Pretty, this is a fate almost worse than death.  Tally manages to reach the Smoke where she discovers life in New Pretty Town isn't all it's cracked up to be.

In this novel, Westerfeld's gifts lie in the descriptions of the landscapes and the character's actions.  From the beginning, with the portrayal of life in New Pretty Town signals that this isn't your run-of-the-mill dystopia.  As the heroine, Tally isn't necessarily dissatisfied with her life.  She never contemplates leaving the city until forced to do so by the Special Circumstances.  Tally isn't going to rebel against the government initially, because to her, she has nothing about which to be rebellious.  The small details of government intrusion are part and parcel of her existence.  It doesn't occur to Tally to even consider the constant tracking of her person and activities might have a more ominous purpose other than safety.  Nor does it occur to Tally to question the need to make all the residents of the city uniformly beautiful.  At least not until she lands in the Smoke and encounters David, who was born in the Smoke and shows Tally there's another way to live life and gain satisfaction from it.  Unfortunately, as a character, Tally is somewhat passive.  She rarely acts on her own, unless someone forces her hand.  This isn't to say she isn't intelligent. She is.  Shay leaves Tally a cryptic message with directions to the Smoke that Tally successfully and easily interprets, and when presented with pieces of information, Tally can easily connect the dots and come to her own conclusions about things.

The setting in Uglies is one of the most well-done aspects of the book.  It's not too terribly difficult to picture towering houses that seem lighter than air, filled with shrieking, pretty teenagers.  The glimpse we see of life in New Pretty Town resembles a university fraternity straight out of Hollywood, in a never-ending cycle of fancy dress and formal parties.  It's also not hard to see the remains of the Rusty Ruins or the settlement at the Smoke, due to Westerfeld's vivid descriptions.

Other ways in which the setting provides the structure for another underlying theme of the novel are the Rusty Ruins and a field of genetically modified snow-white orchids.  The Rusty Ruins were once a major city, its inhabitants killed and structures left to moulder as a reminder of how ecologically destructive people used to be.  The explanation is that someone created a bacteria to infect petroleum, which would then render it unstable.  The petroleum (and its products) "exploded on contact with oxygen.  The spores were released on the smoke, and spread on the wind" (Westerfeld 329).  Society and life as the Rusties knew it was gone.  The orchids were a valuable flower, whose bulbs recall the tulip mania of seventeenth century Holland.  They were so valuable that someone tinkered with their genetic structure to make them adapt to various growing conditions.  The result is that the orchids are now a noxious weed that chokes out any other life form turning the area into a biological wasteland.

Finally, there's the reason why the people in the city undergo such extensive plastic surgery: "A million years of evolution had made it part of the human brain.  The big eyes and lips said: I'm young and vulnerable, I can't hurt you, and you want to protect me.  And the rest said: I'm healthy, I won't make you sick... It was biology, they said at school. Like your heart beating, you couldn't help believing all these things, not when you saw a face like this.  A pretty face" (Westerfeld 16).   There are echoes of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in Westerfeld's Pretty culture.  In Fahrenheit 451, books are banned so as not to upset people by the ideas in them.  In Uglies, "everyone is happy, because everyone looks the same: They're all pretty" (Westerfeld 254).  One of the clever bits is how the government succeeds in convincing every child that they are indeed Ugly.  They've been conditioned from birth to think they are ugly ducklings just waiting to become a swan when they turn 16.  Furthermore, they're taught in school that "Everyone judged everyone else based on their appearance.  People who were taller got better jobs, and people even voted for some politicians just because they weren't quite as ugly as everybody else... people killed one another over stuff like having different skin color... So what if people look more alike now? It's the only way to make people equal" (Westerfeld 43).  The government also does something to their brains during the initial plastic surgery to make the people seem "sure of themselves... confident, and at the same time disconnected from... ugly real-life problems" (Westerfeld 258).  It turns the teenagers into docile, contented people, who reinforce the status quo.  Jennifer Mattson's review in School Library Journal calls it an "eerily harmonious... society" (1287).

Westerfeld has also carefully appropriated technology from films, like the hoverboards from Back to the Future II, and added his own touches, like the crash bracelets Tally wears to keep from falling to the ground if she falls off her hoverboard or bungee jackets that mimic the experience of bungee jumping, but are used as a safety device in case of a fire.  Westerfeld doesn't allow the technology to overshadow the story, and it doesn't veer out of the realm of impossibility.  The hoverboards use a magnetic system that utilizes the metals in the earth and water.  It grounds the plot in a foreseeable future.  She can even control her wall screen (think really massive computer monitor) with eye blinks.

The characterizations are somewhat stereotypical.  Tally as the young adult who leaves home in search of something (Nilsen et al. 348).  David, the native Smokie, has the advantage of having grown up independent of the city, yet his parents are refugees from the city.  He's been taught everything Tally and Shay have, but his knowledge is heavily peppered with a dose of reality, not what the city wants him to believe.  Shay is the Friend archetype, whose actions ultimately propel Tally into action (Nilsen et al. 348).  David's parents, Maddy and Az, can be classified as Sages (Nilsen et al. 348).  It's their story that allows the puzzle pieces to fall together in Tally's mind.  The novel's main weakness to me is that the characters never quite rise above their archetypes and develop into complex characters.  This could change as the series continues.

The novel weighs in at just over 400 pages, which is not an insignificant amount to some readers.  Westerfeld keeps the pace up through his animated depictions of the action.  The book isn't very dialog-heavy, and the pace of the book rests on the action sequences.  I'd like to note here that when I say action, I don't mean it reads like an Indiana Jones movie.  It's the descriptions of Tally's life, what Shay and Tally do before Shay runs away, and Tally's journey to the Smoke that make up the action that keeps the book moving along briskly.  It does lag a bit in places, especially when Tally and Shay make repeated references to the selfish silliness that caused the destruction of the Rusties.  Westerfeld's ecological message becomes blunted after hearing yet again how dumb the Rusties were.

One thing that is interesting in the book is that today's fashion models are not considered the epitome of beauty in Tally's age.  Quite the contrary.  In a poignant scene after Tally arrives at the Smoke, Shay shows her magazines from our time, full of what we consider "pretty", or rather what the media tells us is pretty.  They're amazed at how thin these women are, how unhealthy they look.  This scene is a pointed jab at conventional ideas of beauty and leads a reader to question if someone like Nicole Kidman would be considered unhealthily thin, just what is the city's idea of perfect beauty and proportion?

The two overarching themes of ecological damage and standards of beauty seem to be fighting one another for supremacy in the novel.  Hopefully Westerfeld can link them together in the later books.  Seeing as how this is the first of four novels, there's a lot of exposition in this novel that hopefully lays a good foundation for the other three.

Teachers can use Uglies one of two ways.  They can use it to discuss body image and the definition of beauty and how it changes from culture to culture, and even from era to era.  Teachers can also use it as part of a unit on ecology and the environment.  Laura McConnell, a middle school librarian, uses the Uglies series in a display about environmental issues, pairing the books with non-fiction titles about renewable energy (School Librarian's Workshop 12).

Westerfeld's other novels include: the rest of the Uglies series -- Pretties, Specials, Extras; the Leviathan series --  Leviathan, Behemoth, and Goliath; the Midnighters series -- The Secret Hour, Touching Darkness, and Blue Noon.  Uglies was also turned into a graphic novel, but presented from Shay's point-of-view called Uglies: Shay's Story.

You can visit Westerfeld's webpage.  It has a schedule of his upcoming events, book trailers and discussion questions.

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Works Cited

"Ideas on Display." School Librarian's Workshop 29.6 (2009): 12-. Education Source. Web. 27 June 2014.

Mattson, Jennifer. "Uglies (Book)." Booklist 101.14 (2005): 1287-. Education Source. Web. 27 June 2014.

Nilsen, Alleen Pace, et al. Literature for Today's Young Adults. Boston: Pearson, 2013. Print.
Westerfeld, Scott. Uglies. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005. Print.

'Eleanor & Park' by Rainbow Rowell

Rowell, Rainbow. Eleanor & Park. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013.

Photo by: L. Propes

You could pick Eleanor and Park off the pages of this book and drop them into a John Hughes movie or an Amy Sherman-Palladino television series.  They certainly wouldn’t be out of place among the misfits of The Breakfast Club or Pretty In Pink or the rapid-fire, pop-culture laden dialog of Gilmore Girls or Bunheads.  While the idea of two teenaged misfits finding each other and falling in love seems like it’s been done a million times before, Rainbow Rowell makes Eleanor& Park seem fresh and new, and it lies in the way her two titular characters are able to expose their vulnerabilities to one another without descending into a sea of cynicism and snark. 

Eleanor & Park begins in August 1986 and follows the tentative beginnings of Eleanor and Park’s burgeoning friendship that blossoms gradually into love.  They “don’t meet cute; they meet vexed” (“Eleanor & Park” Kirkus).  Eleanor is the new girl in their Omaha school. She’s zaftig, tall, with lots of curly red hair.  Her wardrobe choices make her look like she’s wearing a Halloween costume, and she has nowhere to sit on the bus.  Park is the half-Korean, punk and New Wave-loving, comic-book-reading outsider who grudgingly lets Eleanor sit next to him on the bus.  Park realizes Eleanor is reading his comic books over his shoulder and the foundations of their friendship are formed on the wordless bus rides to and from school, bonding over X-Men.  Eventually, Park begins to lend Eleanor his comic books (still without saying a word), and after weeks of silently trading comics, he breaks the ice by asking about the song titles Eleanor has written on the covers of her textbooks.  (Just so you know Rowell isn’t condoning vandalism, Eleanor has made protective covers for her textbooks using brown paper grocery bags.  That’s what she’s doodled on, not the actual book cover.) 

Eleanor and Park couldn’t be more different from one another on the surface.  Eleanor’s parents are divorced, and she hardly sees her father.  Her mother is married to a man who mentally and physically abuses her and makes life miserable for Eleanor and her four siblings.  In fact, Richie, Eleanor’s stepfather, kicked Eleanor out of the house for a year, and when the novel begins, has just “allowed” her to move back in with the family. The family is so poor they can’t afford things like toothpaste or regular shampoo, and Eleanor shares a room with her younger sister and three younger brothers.  Eleanor’s mother has expressly forbidden her to date or have contact with boys outside of school. It’s unclear if this is her mother’s wish, or if it’s something she’s done to appease Richie.  Eleanor is also deeply insecure about many things -- her weight, her appearance, and even her worthiness to be with a person she feels is as decent as Park.  She hides her insecurities under a cool and collected façade, but every so often a bullying incident creates a fissure and allows the anxieties to show.  She has a sharp wit and original insight of literature, even going so far as to challenge the entrenched opinion of Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy, viewing it as a satiric look at love (Rowell 44). 

Park’s parents are happily married, and are openly demonstrative with one another in front of Park and his younger brother.  Their house is always neat and tidy, and unlike Eleanor, Park isn’t worried about where his next meal will come from.  His mother is a beautician and sells Avon. Park thinks that she would be the most popular girl on the school bus (Rowell 118).  Park can have a difficult relationship with his father, mostly due to their clashing personalities and differing ideas about what it means to be a man, but it’s obvious that Park’s father loves and cares about him.  Park’s family life, which also includes his paternal grandparents who live next-door, is stable and solidly middle-class.  Park’s mother doesn’t want Park to have a girlfriend so he can focus on his studies, but accepts that Park is seeing Eleanor.  Park’s willingness to push the envelope of typical masculine behavior (like wearing black eyeliner to school) frustrates and bemuses his father.  Park tends to engage in low-level passive-aggressive behavior to display his rejection of the image of a stereotypical All-American Midwestern teenager that his father wants him to have.  Park isn’t a saint, though.  He’s plagued by his own insecurities about his ethnic heritage and his low social status in the neighborhood.  Sometimes, his insecurities come out in full force, and unfortunately, their target is sometimes Eleanor.  After an argument with Eleanor regarding Park’s previous (and long-ago) relationship with her nemesis Tina, Park admits to himself a part of him “didn’t want Tina to get over him” (Rowell 178).  As much as Park wants to project to the world that he doesn’t care what they think of him, as demonstrated by dating Eleanor, he admits to himself it does matter because “he [keeps] finding new pockets of shallow inside himself.  He [keeps] finding new ways to betray her” (Rowell 178). 

Throughout the year, Eleanor is haunted by small incidents of bullying, including filthy messages scrawled on the covers of her textbooks.  She comes to a horrifying realization about the author of the notes and must make a decision to stay in Omaha or run away to see if her uncle in St. Paul, Minnesota will offer her sanctuary. 

Rowell sets up the novel with a framing device, that’s almost repeated verbatim at the end, written in Park’s voice.  She alternates the rest of the narrative between Eleanor and Park, sometimes switching voices to give the reader their individual reactions to the same event.  When she switches between Park and Eleanor’s respective narration, Rowell notes it with a heading that simply says “Park” or “Eleanor”.   I found both of their voices to be quite distinct from one another.  Park, for example, has a much more lyrical voice.  The first time he holds her hand, he says, “Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly.  Or a heartbeat.  Like holding something complete, and completely alive” (Rowell 71).  Eleanor, on the other hand describes it this way: “Disintegrated.  Like something had gone wrong beaming her onto the Starship Enterprise.  If you’ve ever wondered what that feels like, it’s a lot like melting -- but more violent” (Rowell 72).  Eleanor’s voice has its own poetry, but she is much more straightforward about what she thinks, keeping her more intimate emotions tightly under wraps.  She often adds parenthetical comments to her own inner monologue. 

Their relationship is “chaste first love, authentic in its awkwardness -- full of insecurities, miscommunications, and sexual awakenings -- and life-changing for them” (Ritter 93).  The relationship, as viewed through the prism of their words is -- and there’s no other word for it -- intense.  This intensity, which a reader can feel from the first moment Park slips his fingers through Eleanor’s, shines through in their inner thoughts, and sometimes in their dialog with each other.  During a rare telephone conversation, Eleanor tells Park, “I don’t like you, Park,” she said, sounding for a second like she actually meant it.  “I…” -- her voice nearly disappeared -- “think I live for you” (Rowell 111).  Taken out of context, this could be the corniest bit of dialog ever written, but when placed within the backdrop of Eleanor’s chaotic home life and marginalized position inside her own family; it works and sounds nothing but natural coming out of Eleanor’s mouth.  The emotional flights of fancy the narrative takes are mostly in the inner monologues of the characters, so when they do utter a whimsical phrase, it feels organic, as if Eleanor or Park have loosened their Vulcan death grip on their own feelings.  Of course, exchanges like this also bring to light the question of whether or not Eleanor’s feelings for Park are genuine or whether she’s subconsciously using him to escape her family. 

The dialog between Eleanor and Park also reveal their wry sense of humor, especially during a discussion when Eleanor compares Cyclops from X-Men to Batman, stating how boring they both are.  When Park protests and tells her he’s going to loan her his copy of The Dark Knight Returns, he says it’s “Only the least boring Batman story ever” (Rowell 60).  Eleanor retorts, “The least boring Batman story ever, huh?  Does Batman raise both eyebrows?” (Rowell 60). 

Park’s parents -- Jamie and Min-Dae “Mindy” Sheridan -- aren’t relegated to the background of the novel.  They play an active role in the story and experience just as much growth and character development as Park and Eleanor.  In his review of the novel for the New York Times, John Green (yes, that John Green) calls Park’s parents “two of the best-drawn adults I can remember in a young adult novel” (“Two Against the World”).  Park’s father wants Park to be the kind of Midwestern man with which Mr. Sheridan is most familiar -- tough and brawny.  Oh, and able to drive a stick shift.  It’s clear Mr. Sheridan’s respect grows for Park and the way he quietly stands up for Eleanor, willing to do what it takes to protect her.  It’s Mrs. Sheridan who displays the most development out of the two.  She’s not fond of Eleanor when they first meet, but a chance glimpse of Eleanor with her mother and siblings at the grocery store on Christmas Eve reveals to Mrs. Sheridan the level of Eleanor’s struggles, and makes her realize she has more in common with Eleanor than at first glance.  Mrs. Sheridan met Mr. Sheridan when he was serving in Korea in the late 1960s.  They married in Seoul, South Korea, and Mrs. Sheridan proceeded to leave everything she knew behind.  Park mentions how she never talks about her life in Korea, but on Christmas Eve, Mrs. Sheridan recognizes the poverty and hunger behind the nervous and uncertain front Eleanor presents in the Sheridans’ home.  Coming from such dire straits, the Sheridan house might as well be a foreign country to Eleanor. 

I feel Rowell’s inclusion of a discussion of Romeo and Juliet isn’t an accident.  Park remarks that the play reminds “people… what it’s like to be young… and in love” (Rowell 45).  In her blog “Monkey See”, NPR correspondent Linda Holmes comments that for Park and Eleanor, who “feel lost -- because of bullying, because of abuse, because of race… being loved makes them feel less lost” (“True Love”).  Rowell doesn’t shy away from the harrowing abuse Richie hurls at Eleanor or the rest of her family.  Holmes, in particular praises Rowell for this saying, “Ugliness -- honesty about ugliness -- is important, because it gives shape and meaning to some important stories about not allowing it to swamp you” (“True Love").  In an interview with the online magazine The Toast, Rowell responds to people who feel her book should be banned because of its unflinching content.  She says, “When these people call Eleanor & Park an obscene story, I feel like they’re saying that rising above your situation isn’t possible.  That if you grow up in an ugly situation, your story isn’t even fit for good people’s ears.  That ugly things cancel out everything beautiful” (Ortberg “A Chat With Rainbow Rowell”).  Spending most of my teaching career working with kids who weren’t very different from Eleanor or Park, this is the kind of book they need to read, if for no other reason than to find out that there are people like them, who have found a way to survive their situation. 

Rowell is also the author of Fangirl, Landline, and Attachments. Eleanor & Park is a 2014 Printz Honor book. 

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Works Cited 

"Eleanor & Park." Kirkus Reviews 80.24 (2012): 149-. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2014.

Green, John. "Two Against the World." The New York Times, sec. Sunday Book Review: BR17. March 8 2013. Print.

Holmes, Linda. "True Love, Book Fights, and Why Ugly Stories Matter." Monkey See. September 18 2013.Web. 22 June 2014. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/09/18/223738674/true-love-book-fights-and-why-ugly-stories-matter>.

Ortberg, Mallory. "A Chat With Rainbow Rowell About Love and Censorship." The Toast. September 17 2013.Web. 22 June 2014. <http://the-toast.net/2013/09/17/chat-rainbow-rowell-love-censorship/>.

Ritter, Cynthia K. "Eleanor & Park." Horn Book Magazine 89.3 (2013): 93-4. Education Source. Web. 22 June 2014.

Rowell, Rainbow.  Eleanor & Park. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013. Print.

'Monster' by Walter Dean Myers, Illustrated by Christopher Myers

Myers, Walter Dean. Monster. Illus. Christopher Myers.  New York: HarperTeen, 1999.

There is a mirror over the steel sink in my cell.  It’s six inches high, and scratched with the names of some guys who were here before me.   When I look into the small rectangle, I see a face looking back at me but I don’t recognize it.  It doesn’t look like me.  I couldn’t have changed that much in a few months.  I wonder if I will look like myself when the trial is over (Myers 1-2).

This is our first introduction to Steve Harmon, a sixteen year-old boy on trial for murder in New York City.  Walter Dean Myers’ acclaimed novel, Monster, follows Steve through his trial, where he wrestles with the question of whether or not he is, as labeled by the prosecuting attorney, a monster.  At first glance, it seems as if Steve was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but flashbacks interspersed through the trial testimony, reveal small details that aren’t discussed in the trial, nor in the journal Steve keeps during the trial, a journal his lawyer admonishes him “not to write anything in… that [he does] not want the prosecutor to see” (Myers 137).  The small disparities between the journal entries and the testimony call into question Steve’s declared innocence and leads the reader to ponder the question: is he truly innocent of the crime or guilty?

Monster, the winner of the inaugural Printz Award, is a searing indictment of the justice system, the prison system, and the social structure that “links the credibility of males to displays and postures of toughness, physical strength, and the threat or use of violence” (Earp and Katz qtd. in Groenke, Maples, and Henderson 34).  The novel also questions the morality many of the prisoners employ in their ability to “separate themselves from their acts that permitted them to commit those acts in the first place” (Goodson 28).  Myers noticed a common thread in the stories he heard from various prisoners he interviewed as part of the research for Monster.  In an interview with Lori Atkins Goodson, he states,

I was shocked to find out how many of the inmates whose stories I was hearing were surprised to find themselves in prison… They uniformly thought of themselves as good people who had made some mistake, which had taken them afoul of the law… It was a common occurrence to find an interviewee speaking of himself… in the first person when talking about their upbringing, and then switching to the third person when speaking of the crime of which they had been convicted (28).

Myers states that it was this disconnect from their actions that formed the backbone of Monster  (Goodson 28).  Myers writes the novel as a hybrid of Steve’s journal entries and a screenplay that Steve also writes as the trial progresses. (Steve also happens to attend a magnet school where he studies filmmaking.)  The different formats represent Steve’s ability to separate himself from the scene of the crime.  The journal is written in first person, but the screenplay places Steve firmly in the third person, although it shows, in Steve’s words, his experience of the trial (Myers 4).  As Steve is the director, screenwriter, and star of his movie, he is able to shape the audience’s perception of the other members of his “cast” though the use of stage directions and camera angles or descriptions of the other cast members that focus on details, like Osvaldo’s gang tattoos (Schneider 20).    

This disconnect is also evident in the testimony of the witnesses called by the prosecution.  Many of them have been accused of crimes themselves, but have finagled a deal with the prosecution to exchange their testimony for a lighter sentence or a plea deal.  It is not always clear whether or not the witnesses are actually telling the truth, other than their testimony that claims they are.  The witnesses exemplify a central tenant of the novel: how do we know when someone is telling the truth?  Furthermore, the witnesses could very well be truthful, but their status as an inmate colors the reader’s (and jury’s) perceptions of their testimony.  Osvaldo, one of the prosecution’s witnesses, is timid and in fear of his life on the stand, but Steve’s flashback of an encounter with Osvaldo reveals a very different persona, one that scoffs at Steve for his reluctance to engage in the kind of lifestyle accepted by the other males in the neighborhood and has a confrontational attitude.

One of the other themes of the novel centers on the idea that all young men of color are the same in the eyes of a jury.  Kathy O’Brien, Steve’s lawyer, spends much of the trial attempting to make the jury see Steve as separate from his co-defendant, James King.  It is a task made more difficult by the fact that both Steve and James are African-American and “look like most of the other prisoners in the jail, so how is the jury to tell that he is any different from the unsavory witnesses and other defendants?” (Schneider 20). Steve even notes in more than one instance that his own lawyer is unsure of his guilt or innocence, perhaps subconsciously grouping Steve with James because of Steve’s race and a belief that a person will say or do anything to avoid a lengthy jail sentence.   

Part of Steve's journal
Photo by: L. Propes

Susan Groenke and Melissa Youngquist classify Monster as a postmodern novel due to Myers’ use of the following characteristics of postmodern literature: identity in flux as a theme, genre eclecticism, interplay between word and image, and active readers (506-507).  Steve’s identity is never settled during the novel, and even at the end, he is not able to definitively answer who he really is (Groenke and Youngquist 506).  Groenke and Youngquist characterize Steve as in a constant struggle to “understand who he is as an African American male, a star student, and a loving son and brother in a society that tells him he can only be one of two things: a thug or a sellout” (506).  As discussed earlier, the novel employs multiple formats to expose the reader to Steve and his personality.  The epistolary sections provide a glimpse into Steve’s inner thoughts and feelings, revealing his terror at the thought of spending the next twenty years behind bars.  The rest of the text of the novel employs a conventional screenplay format that serves to distance Steve in the journal from the Steve in the trial.  Flashbacks that show Steve in scenes with his family, James King (the other person on trial), and other people from his neighborhood provide a level of ambiguity that contributes to the questions of Steve’s innocence.  Christopher Myers’ illustrations show photographs of Steve in various places: the prison, the drugstore (presumably the day of the robbery and murder), and even a courtroom drawing of Steve and his attorney when his verdict is read.  The photographs, which are paired with relevant text, also aim to create an image of Steve that leads the reader to further question Steve’s motives and innocence (Groenke and Youngquist 507).  All of these elements combine together to force the reader to “fill in the gaps and pull together discrete parts or narrative strands” in order to come to a conclusion about Steve (Groenke and Youngquist 507). 

A page of screenplay format
Photo by: L. Propes

Myers comments in an essay at the end of the novel, “kids don’t think about things until after they happen… That’s typical of kids -- you do things first, then you think about it.  By the time you think about it, you’re in big trouble. I think the problem with so many young people is that violence gets to be a resource.  When nothing else works for you, violence always does, and you’re always drawn to it” (292).  Those fingerprints, so to speak, are all over Monster.  Steve does something (although it’s left ambiguous in the novel just what he does) that implicates him in the robbery and murder, but doesn’t think about the ramifications of where he was at that specific moment until well after the event and he’s sitting in jail.  At the end of the novel, Steve is still examining his actions.  The other characters -- Osvaldo, James, Bobo, and the other inmates in the prison -- personify the second part of Myers’ statement.  They have grown so accustomed to committing acts of violence and getting what they want out of it, that it’s become their go-to method of coping with life.  Steve comments on the level of violence within the prison in his journal: “Violence in here is always happening or just about ready to happen.  I think these guys like it -- they want it to be normal because that’s what they’re used to dealing with” (Myers 144). 

One of Christopher Myers'
illustrations
Photo by: L. Propes

Monster is an interesting novel that presents “kids that were not ‘good’, ‘smart’, and growing up in the perfect home” (Blumenstetter 39).  It gives students, especially minority students, a character who looks like them, their friends, or family members and shows a “world they live in every day” (Blumenstetter 39).  One level of difficulty students might have with it lies in the postmodern structure of the novel, as displayed in Groenke and Youngquist’s experience teaching Monster to a ninth-grade English class (508-510).  The novel is largely linear in its structure, but the flashbacks are not conspicuously set apart from the trial testimony, so it might be confusing to some readers to see an event that isn’t directly related to the trial in the middle of a trial. If students are not familiar with the structure of a screenplay or a script, they might have a bit of an adjustment period with the technical terminology Steve uses in the stage directions and camera angles.  There are small bits of dark humor scattered through Steve’s journal entries when the inmates discuss their cases.  One anecdote in particular exemplifies this in which a man who was charged with armed robbery, assault, and menacing, among other things, claims that because the jewelry store had an automatic locking system, he wasn’t able to actually steal anything and didn’t have a gun anyway, he shouldn’t be charged with a crime. The text is rich with bits and pieces like this that can instigate debate in a classroom apart from the main question of the novel.  Students who are fans of Law and Order marathons will probably love this book. 

Teachers who choose to offer Monster as either a whole-class reading or an option in a literature circle can have their students research statistics for the incarceration rates of minorities and the crimes for which they’ve been convicted.  They can also debate Steve’s guilt or innocence, using evidence gleaned from the novel.  Students can also present ideas to help students like Osvaldo before he becomes part of the system.  Some classes might need structured guidance to read this novel, given its unorthodox format. 

Monster not only won the Printz Award, it also won a Coretta Scott King honor and was a National Book Award finalist. 

If a teacher wants to compare the relative merits of the Printz winner and honor books from 2000, the honor books were: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Skellig by David Almond, and Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger. 

Myers is also the author of: Fallen Angels, Sunrise Over Fallujah, Scorpions, Slam!, Bad Boy, Autobiography Of My Dead Brother, Riot, and Darius & Twig, just to name a few.  For a complete list of his published works, please visit his website.  Myers is a prolific author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction.

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Works Cited

Blumenstetter, Kerri Gallagher. "Walter Dean Myers Writes for Inner-City Students." Social Science Docket 12.2 (2012): 39-40. Web. Education Research Complete. 16 June 2014.

Goodson, Lori Atkins. "Walter Dean Myers: A Monster of a Voice for Young Adults." The ALAN Review. 36.1 (2008): 26-31. Web. Free E-Journals. 16 June 2014.

Groenke, Susan L., Joellen Maples, and Jill Henderson. "Raising “Hot Topics” through Young Adult Literature." Voices from the Middle 17.4 (2010): 29-36. Web. National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). 16 June 2014.

Groenke, Susan Lee, and Michelle Youngquist. "Are we Postmodern Yet? Reading Monster with 21st-Century Ninth Graders." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 54.7 (2011): 505-13. Web. Education Research Complete. 16 June 2014.

Myers, Walter Dean. Monster. Ills. Christopher Myers. New York: HarperTeen, 1999. Print.

Schneider, Dean. "The Novel as Screenplay: Monster and Riot by Walter Dean Myers." Book Links 19.2 (2010): 20-3. Web. Academic Search Complete. 16 June 2014.