[tps_header]Monster by Walter Dean Meyers[/tps_header]
The book opens with a handwritten journal entry from a 16-year-old boy in a detention center. “The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beat up and screaming for help,” he writes. When I read this, I think about Kalief Browder and the countless numbers of young black boys currently being decimated by a system that sees them not as children, but as monsters. Myers, a young adult writer from Harlem, is masterful in telling the story of Steve Harmon.
