Monster

Title: Monster
Author: Walter Dean Myers
ISBN: 0060280778


Plot Summary: Steve Harmon is a 16-year-old African American teenager who has been arrested and is on trial for the murder of a shopkeeper. Before his arrest, he was active in his school's film club, and frequently fantasizes about making a movie about the trial, his experiences in jail, and his own inner thoughts. Although the reader is initially not sure whether Steve is guilty or not, we come to see through Steve's diary and "screenplay" of his experiences that there is more to the case that first meets the eye, and that Steve may not be a perpetrator of a heinous crime, but rather an unwitting victim of circumstance and a victim of a justice system whose scale is tipped against poor, young minority males.