The Beast, Walter Dean Myers, 8/50
Jun. 16th, 2009 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraCross-posted to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc
The Beast, Walter Dean Myers, 8/50. This is a very careful, balanced novel – the metaphor throughout is that of the labyrinth, with the beast at its heart, but the danger is not so much the monster itself as the ever-present possibility of losing your way. Anthony Witherspoon comes back to Harlem after his first term at a Connecticut prep school, to find new gaps between himself and his friends there; of most concern is his girlfriend Gabi, who has become distant from both Spoon and the Gabi he remembers.
It would have been easy to tell this story as a standard problem novel and flatten the characters out to fit; what it is instead is a story not just about individuals, but about the different communities they inhabit, and how some people manage to move between them, while others are lost. Nicely done.
50books_pocThe Beast, Walter Dean Myers, 8/50. This is a very careful, balanced novel – the metaphor throughout is that of the labyrinth, with the beast at its heart, but the danger is not so much the monster itself as the ever-present possibility of losing your way. Anthony Witherspoon comes back to Harlem after his first term at a Connecticut prep school, to find new gaps between himself and his friends there; of most concern is his girlfriend Gabi, who has become distant from both Spoon and the Gabi he remembers.
It would have been easy to tell this story as a standard problem novel and flatten the characters out to fit; what it is instead is a story not just about individuals, but about the different communities they inhabit, and how some people manage to move between them, while others are lost. Nicely done.
