ABSTRACT
REVIEWED BY JASMINE Z. LESTER Walter Dean Myers’s The Beast (2003) focuses on seventeen-year-old Anthony “Spoon” Witherspoon’s transition from the streets of Harlem to an exclusive Connecticut boarding school. At first, it manifests in the sudden change of environment: the loss of the Harlem streets and the loss of familiar friends. Then it is seen in the change in Spoon, too. After spending months at the school, Spoon is looking forward to returning home to Harlem on his break. When he arrives, however, things are not the same. Everything has changed, from the friends he used to hang out with to his girlfriend, Gabi. He realizes his interest in her is dwindling as her once lively personality becomes tired and sad because her mother is sick. When he has a run-in with Chanelle, a girl from the prep school, over the break, he is almost sure his interest in Gabi is not what it used to be. Myers uses Spoon’s relationship with Gabi to represent his feelings for his home in Harlem, where he would not have much of a chance of going to a good college. Chanelle, on the other hand, represents the school and the potential benefits it holds, such as the possibility of obtaining a scholarship to college. The book is centered on Spoon’s actions that sometimes lead him closer to home and sometimes farther away. When he finds Gabi high on drugs in a house with other people who are high, he describes them as being prey for “the beast.” The way Myers develops the beast, it is the force pulling Spoon away from the safety of his life.
