Yes, Monster Is Banned!

Monster is the story of Steve Harmon, a sixteen-year-old from Harlem who is on trial for felony murder after a drugstore robbery goes wrong. Steve, a film student, processes his experience by writing it as a screenplay, complete with stage directions and camera angles. The format shifts between his script and his journal entries from jail. Published in 1999 by HarperCollins and illustrated with photographs by Christopher Myers, it won the first Michael L. Printz Award and was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book.

Seven families in Oak Park District 97 in Illinois filed requests to remove Monster from the curriculum in 2013, citing explicit language and mature themes. The book had been taught in the district since 2008 without complaint. Administrators removed it despite strong public protest. In Wentzville, Missouri, it was banned in 2022. Leander ISD in Texas and Duval County in Florida followed. Myers, who grew up in Harlem and became one of the most celebrated authors of young adult literature, said he wasn’t surprised. He wrote about kids the school system had already written off.

Why You Should Read This

Myers put a Black teenager in the defendant’s chair and asked readers to sit with him through every minute of a trial that might end his life. Steve doesn’t know if he’s guilty. The reader doesn’t know either. That ambiguity is the whole point. The screenplay format keeps you at a distance, the way the justice system keeps Steve at a distance from his own humanity, and then his journal entries pull you right back in.

The challenges to Monster focus on language and violence, but the real discomfort is watching how quickly a teenager becomes “a monster” in the eyes of a system that never saw him as fully human in the first place. Myers wrote for kids who didn’t see themselves in books, the ones in juvenile detention, in foster care, in neighborhoods that never made it onto a reading list. Banning his work removes exactly the mirror those kids need most.