Sometimes he was so flat, he seemed to be a caricature of a young boy on trial. But I agree with Stephen that Myers should have just stuck to the journal form, as this is where the character came across the clearest, and seemed the most sympathetic.Īs Stephen pointed out a bit, the Steve character didn’t seem consistent throughout. If I didn’t think that this book was as much a comment on the judicial system as it is a coming of age story about a boy in a rough circumstance, I wouldn’t condone the screenplay method. The screenplay sections were pretty dry in terms of character development and emotions, although I do think it kept the courtroom scenes, which made up the majority of the book, moving, which can be tricky to do in a typical prose format. Rhetorically, the main element that stood out to me in this story-as I’m sure it did to many-was the structure: a screenplay. Now that I’m older and wiser (yeah right) I can look at the story from a less passionate perspective. Nevertheless, I am absolutely blown away that I somehow chose to remember the conclusion of the story this way. In my middle school mind, those few weeks he spent in prison were devastating enough. My only logical explanation for such a drastic misremembering is that the majority of the story itself-a defenseless kid in the wrong place at the wrong time-was so disturbing, he didn’t even need to be acquitted to receive my deepest sympathy. I dreaded the book’s completion the entire way through, up to the ending when…he was acquitted?
All these years I’ve remembered how devastated I was by this book, by its tragic ending when poor Steve was sentenced to life. I was so nervous to read Monster the second time around, knowing as I did that Steve, the main character, was convicted at the end.
I was so affected by this book that it lead me to write several short stories, jump on the prison reform bandwagon, and get myself in some not-so-minor legal trouble when I attempted to become pen pals with a series of convicted felons. Reading this book in 8th grade was a major milestone for me.
Myers should have known his narrator a little better. But Steve was so flat, I didn’t really care if he was a monster or not, because we were never granted access to his mind.Īlso, for journal entries, Steve had remarkably good spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Why did Myers talk about it? He wanted the reader to make any assumptions about that kind of neighborhood, like the jury most likely did. If Myers didn’t want it to be important, he wouldn’t have mentioned it nor the neighborhood Steve grew up in. He was a black teenager–race came up in the courtroom. If Myers had done that, than his poor attempt at rousing social debate would have been more successful. If he was at the robbery, did he see it as a movie? I’m not saying portray him as an actual delusional person–just someone with a very intense passion. The script gave me nothing I still question Steve’s innocence of the crime some people might argue that that’s the point, but I beg to differ he repeatedly said he didn’t do it but then one moment later he said he couldn’t remember–he was just walking around his neighborhood, seeing images for movies THAT’S why I wanted Myers to push this boy into his own world of movies the ambivalence of his culpability would have been appropriate.
Why couldn’t the whole novel be his journal, talking about his movie, instead of actually writing a script? Everything he goes through, he sees as a show that would give him distance away from everything.
Myers paints Steve as a boy who sees everything as a movie a production. There were so many other ways this could have played out. Oh, how successful this could have been had Myers stayed in the JOURNAL mode! Those were the only moments I almost got a grasp of Steve. Movies are always a gamble you need the right actors to pull off the dialogue Steve was just a movie character with no life for me the script read as just a rough outline of a story. Apart from a spectacular first name, I never connected to our narrator. The fact that this was written as a screenplay was a gimmick I can understand why it was written in this format Myers was trying to create a character who is making his life into a movie unfortunately the characters failed to visualize in my head the author basically laid it all out for me, so what went wrong? This is one of those novels that frustrates me because in my head I was screaming, ‘this could have been so much better!’ This was almost as bad as ‘The Crying Tree.’