Walter Dean Myers Book Report

The book Monster by Walter Dean Myers is a fictional story of a teenage boy, Steve Harmon. It is a first person narrative, both parts being told from Steve. This book was published in 1999 by Scholastic, with 281 pages. It is written as a script to a movie that Steve is making about part of his life. The part of his life that he is talking about is when he is on trial as an accomplice to a felony murder.

Steve (the protagonist) is an African American boy living in Harlem and he is caught up in a crime, a felony murder of a local drugstore owner. Throughout the whole book, there is a mood that is the sense of doubt, Steve is always doubting if he truly is a monster or not. Steve, himself was not present during the robbery and murder, but he

The trial could have gone either way and that is kind of a scary thought. It’s the difference of whether a teen gets to live out his teen and mid-20 years, or if he spends time in a cell. A main theme that I saw was betrayal in many different ways. One was just simply people betraying each other, and snitching on each other. Another one is Steve’s betrayal of his father’s trust. At the end of the book he doesn’t know what his father thinks of hi anymore. And the most important one to me is Steve’s betrayal of his own feelings. He can’t make his mind up on what he thinks of himself and he is constantly second guessing himself and battling with himself. I think that it was a good book. I had never heard of it before and I had no idea what it was about just based off of the title. It was an easy read, and I enjoyed reading it at the same time. It always had you curious as to what will happen and how everything will play out. Through the whole book, it keeps you curious as to if he will get convicted or not and you do not find out until the very end. The only downside is that I did not like the way it was written. The script format kind of made it hard to follow and hard to keep everything in