Review: Monster

Monster by Walter Dean Myers
Find it at an indie bookstore!

• Why I read it: Cover, awards, recommendations, modern classic
• Disclosure: Received my final published edition from Paperback Swap.

While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.  

There are some YA books so ingrained in the modern psyche that it seems pointless to review them - Harry Potter, obviously, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (which I just finished this week!), anything by Judy Blume or Meg Cabot.  There are lots more that I'm forgetting, I'm sure, but that's beside the point.  Monster very nearly falls into that category, but it's on the fringe enough that I figured it wouldn't hurt to spread the love around a little more - and love is exactly the right word.

As I mentioned in my blurb post, I really had no idea what to expect from this novel, other than that it was supposed to be good, and what I could glean from the cover.  It took me awhile to pick it up, but once I did, I finished it in, max, an hour and a half.  It's short, it's powerful, and it leaves us with more questions than it answers, without being confusing.  What more can you ask from a novel?

What makes it all work is the character of Steve.  Like every teenager, he's made mistakes.  Unlike every teenager, he's made one that could cost him his life, either literally or figuratively, death row or life behind bars.  This tension, and playing out of a usually small-scale issue on a big stage, reminded me a lot of The Hunger Games and Battle Royale.  Honestly, what better metaphor for adolescence and especially high school could you have than a bunch of kids forced to kill or be killed?  Monster, however, hits even closer to home, because it manages to be a metaphor and a real story at the same time.  Steve is no Katniss, no Mockingjay-figurehead-idea.  He's smart, he's funny, he wants to be liked, he's terrified.  He's real.  There wasn't a single moment in this novel he wasn't relatable, even when I didn't always agree with his choices.  Actually, there isn't a YA character in recent memory I've liked more, which only furthers the idea of monsters.  Even as the evidence piles high, we don't want to believe he is one.  We want to believe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim of circumstance, racial profiling, anything - as long as he's not a monster.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the big, ugly issue of race.  While it's not at the center of the novel, as I'd originally thought it might be, it's a major factor, though we're never quite sure how major.  At least three quarters of the characters are black, Latino, or somehow "of color," though it's difficult to tell as Steve doesn't seem too bothered to inform readers of his screenplay draft.  Is the witness to the crime that implicates Steve white?  Is he a victim of racial profiling?  We aren't sure.  Is the novel itself, with a clearly black character on the cover, a victim too?  Is that why it hasn't had quite the impact of similar novels such as Speak even when it's equally good?  Again, we aren't sure.  In short, as a white reader, it raises uncomfortable questions, but they're questions that are important and should be dealt with, and they never descend into guilt trips.  It's brilliant, and for style alone I will definitely be returning to Walter Dean Myers's work in the future.  (I already got a little lost perusing his bibliography as I was writing this review!)

As usual, there's so much more I could write about - the excellent device of the screenplay, Steve's family life, the court scenes that I'm always a sucker for.  But why do that when I can really sum it up in one sentence? Just read the book.   Five out of five stars.

Wearing purple!

Just to follow up with my belated post on Banned Books Week and Spirit Day, it's October 20th, and I'm wearing purple!  Blogger photo uploads are down currently, so I can't share pictures of the awesomeness - also, trust me, nobody wants to see my hair today - but I just wanted to say that this issue is real, heartbreaking, and honestly a matter of life and death.  Suicide is a choice, it's rarely the fault of someone in particular, but I'd like to live in a world where teens don't even have to face that choice.  Wouldn't you?

If you didn't have any purple clothes to wear (I had a heck of a time finding something), how about changing your Twitter or Facebook profile pics for the day?  This page lets you do that and also has some great info about Spirit Day.  Did you blog about Spirit Day?  Have any links to share?  Just have (considerate and respectful) comments to make?  Please leave them in the comments!

Huntress unveiled!

Speaking of covers, the cover of Huntress by Malinda Lo - prequel to Ash, which I adored - was revealed yesterday:

I don't like it as much as the Ash cover, honestly - the design feels a little tackier, and I don't like the purple-on-bluish-white color scheme - but I love the whole face-cut-in-half-by-the-sword thing.  There's also been a lot of buzz on Twitter (and maybe the blogosphere, I don't know) that while Ash's cover featured a fairly generic looking model, with no visible Asian features, this cover model is quite obviously a nod to the Chinese influences on the story.  (Lo is Chinese-American.)  Read the full story on Malinda Lo's blog, and check out the blurb for Huntress below!

Nature is out of balance in the human world. The sun hasn’t shone in years, and crops are failing. Worse yet, strange and hostile creatures have begun to appear. The people’s survival hangs in the balance.
To solve the crisis, the oracle stones are cast, and Kaede and Taisin, two seventeen-year-old girls, are picked to go on a dangerous and unheard-of journey to Taninli, the city of the Fairy Queen. Taisin is a sage, thrumming with magic, and Kaede is of the earth, without a speck of the otherworldly. And yet the two girls’ destinies are drawn together during the mission. As members of their party succumb to unearthly attacks and fairy tricks, the two come to rely on each other and even begin to fall in love. But the Kingdom needs only one huntress to save it, and what it takes could tear Kaede and Taisin apart forever.
The exciting adventure prequel to Malinda Lo’s highly acclaimed novel Ash is overflowing with lush Chinese influences and details inspired by the I Ching, and is filled with action and romance.

So what do you think, readers?  I, for one, am requesting a copy of this at the local library and putting it on hold immediately.  (It releases this April.)  Ash won me over so completely, and this one looks even better!

Covers Matter: Blurbs, covers, or reviews? What gets you excited about a book?

How does a book blogger get most of her books?  Hint: It's not ARCs.  Like I posted before, Paperback Swap has been one of the reasons I've been able to maintain my rabid reading pace (up until college came and derailed things, at least).  I'm not here to post about PBS, though.  I'm here to talk about how I choose PBS books.

I love judging books by their covers.  I may not be able to draw, or take pictures, or do anything remotely visually interesting worth a darn, but I sure do love critique, and book covers make the perfect victims subjects.  I don't think it makes me shallow to say that a cover is 50% of what makes me pick up a book.  I could write a good dozen posts about that, certainly.  But today I'd like to talk about the other 50% of that process - the blurb.

When I'm in a bookstore, narrowing it down to the five (or six, or seven) books I want is pretty easy.  If there's a tiebreaker with the covers, I still have a lot more to go by: Its location in the bookstore (literary? teen? mystery? chick lit?), books next to it that I've read, the reactions of other customers in the bookstore, the recommendations of the owners.  That's why I shop indie.  But the experience on Paperback Swap (and Amazon.com, and B&N's website, and to be fair shopping through indie bookstores' websites) is entirely different.  Suddenly, all I have to go on is the cover and the blurb.  Yeah, sometimes there's handy reviews to go with, but as one of those people who writes those reviews, I try and ignore them so I can make up my own mind while I read.  (Though, fellow book bloggers, your recs do make a big difference when I'm out indulging my bookaholic habit!)

Which is why I'm simultaneously intrigued and frustrated as hell when I run across a cover/blurb combo like Monster by Walter Dean Myers.  I requested this book back on my big requesting spree in June, more because I had credits burning a hole in my pocket than anything else.  It's got great cover design and lots of shiny medals on front, sure, but exactly zero blurb.  Even on Goodreads, the info is decidedly spartan in nature:

While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.  

Full disclosure: I've now read this book.  I adored this book, and if I can get my lazy butt in front of the blog more, I'll be reviewing it tomorrow or the day after.  It haunts me, though - the crazy things that keep me up at night - that I could have passed it by so easily.  It still took finding out that it was on Ari at Reading in Color's wishlist for me to decide I really should pick it up and read it after it had been on my bedside table for four months.  Compare that to Wake by Lisa McMann, which I started reading the day after I bought, even though I hated the cover:

Not all dreams are sweet.  For seventeen-year-old Janie, getting sucked into other people's dreams is getting old.  Especially the falling dreams, the naked-but-nobody-notices dreams, and the sex-crazed dreams.  Janie's seen enough fantasy booty to last her a lifetime.  She can't tell anybody about what she does - they'd never believe her, or worse, they'd think she's a freak.  So Janie lives on the fringe, cursed with an ability she doesn't want and can't control.  Then she falls into a gruesome nightmare, on that chills her to the bone.  For the first time, Janie is more than a witness to someone else's twisted psyche.  She is a participant....

I'm a big fan of any fiction to do with dreams, so that was definitely part of it, but the blurb shows me right off that there's a good story there.  I went from being a writing-over-story kind of person, to a story-over-writing, and now I'm back to writing-over-story - sorry, Twilight - but I won't pretend that the idea of reading a book with no story, as beautifully written as it may be, excites me.  As somebody who's tried to write blurbs for her own novel projects in her spare time, I know how hard it is.  But as a blogger, I'm here to tell publishers and writers that while a cover may be enough to convince me to buy a book, the blurb is what makes me read it, and I can't review a book unless I've read it. 

So now I'm at the point in this post where I ask my readers for their opinion.  What convinces you to buy a book, cover or blurb?  What convinces you to read it?  Or do you rely on reviews to make up your mind?  Please leave your thoughts in the comments!