I really wanted to like this book. I had heard such good things about it. The characters were so kindly and carefully drawn and the world building was interesting. But unfortunately, the more I think about this book, the angrier it makes me.

To start, this is not abstract for me. I have faced my own monster, as a child, alone in the world. Everything that follows, I write from personal experience both with the criminal justice system and my own attempts at restorative justice in the aftermath.

What Makes a Monster?

My first and primary criticism of this book is that, for a book that wants us to be on the lookout for monsters, to never trust in a world that assures us monsters no longer exist, it is completely disinterested in examining what a monster is. It’s easier this way. To believe in a world where there are some bad people we must always be on the lookout for, rather than confronting the truth that, we will all, at various times in our lives, be both victims and victimizers. I don’t think its a mistake that this book relies on the most egregious kind of harm we can imagine as a society, sexual abuse of a child by someone they trust, because it is easy to portray someone who has taken that action as a monster, maybe not deserving of death, but flattened into that singular action. All of the monster’s acts to build community and care for people disappear, when he becomes “bad”. The fact that the “monster” committed harm in the past is a further indictment. A person does not contain multitudes, in this estimation, there are only angels and monsters, and this monster was pretending to be an angel.

Flattening humans down into “good” and “bad” is dangerous. Both, because it grants us permission to throw people away, and because it allows us to put the good people on pedestals and ignore the harm they commit from that high place. I expected this to be the core argument of this book, but it was not. The most terrifying and difficult part of my own victimization has been reckoning with the fact the the person who harmed me, who I trusted, was both kind, caring, curious and loving, and also did an incredibly awful thing that can never be undone. Those things will always coexist. It would be so much easier if he was just a monster.

But even if we do concede to this book’s core premise that some humans are monsters, how are monsters created? That is a question this book does not address.

In reality, most of the people that we see as monsters, started of as scared victimized children, just like the children in this book. People who were introduced to violence by someone they cared about or trusted. In a quote from another book I recently read (We Do This Till We Free Us by Miriame Kaba) “No one enters violence by committing it”. But that is a much more difficult kind of complexity to face.

Divine Knowing, Recognizing Harm and Believing Victims

My next criticism focuses on the mechanism of Pet, a mysterious being from another world instilled with a divine and unquestionable knowing that a child has been harmed and where it happened. How convenient! If only every harmed child had a being that could step through a painting and alert people in their community to take action! Although, instead, one might wish for divine intervention to stop the monster before he causes harm. Or a kind of divine intervention that appears to the actual victim, not some distant acquaintance who has to go on a dark treasure hunt to find the culprit. Which is the core of my criticism. Pet acts as a convenient mechanism within the book to replace having to actually notice and navigate the complexity of behaviours that might indicate a child has been harmed. These warning signs of abuse aren’t even included in the book, except in passing. Pet also replaces the challenge of determining the truth when all you have are messy, first-hand accounts of situations that often have no witnesses. The mechanism of Pet is a lazy way of dealing with this. Pet acts as proof so that the victim does not have to prove himself, he incites the search, and isolates a particular target, so that Jam knows exactly where to look and who to talk to. That is not how the world works, and offers us no framework for how to navigate these situations in community (when we will not have a literal biblical angel spouting divine truth). We will just have people we care about, standing in front of us, and narratives that aren’t always as clear as we’d hope.

The book offers very little to help us recognize abuse when it is happening, other than vague platitudes, that monsters exist and we must be on the lookout for them. Part of my own personal history, is that my victimization was not just personal, but intergenerational. My mom also had to face monsters, and when she had children she was determined that she would protect us from them. She was constantly vigilant. But constant vigilance isn’t actual protection. What signs are we looking for? Not just of harm, but of relationships that could lead to harm? What mechanisms exist to redirect behaviour before harm happens? How do we create openness and freedom from shame that will allow victims to speak openly about their experiences? None of these questions are addressed in this book.

The Role of the Victim

Which brings me to my next area of concern. For a book about a victimized child, man is that kid not a consideration at all in this narrative. He is a plot point, for the search for a monster, for the reckoning the people around him must do, for the justice system’s machinations, but he is barely a character in his own right. This sucks.

So much of this kind of trauma is a removal of your agency, and in this book, Moss has almost no agency at all. He is not included as a partner in the search for or quest to confront his monster, and is not a part of any justice practices that come forward afterward. He’s not even allowed to speak his truth within the book, because it is seen as too shameful. All this is presented as “protecting him”. Pet even intervenes to force the monster to the tell the truth so that Moss never has to speak aloud what happened.

I recognize that under our current criminal justice system, victims are often retraumatized through the processes of evidence collection, police interviews, and the violence of cross-examination during a trial, but having processes that are meant to address harm that completely exclude the person who was harmed is not what any vision of abolition should look like. Even in our current system, the victims of people like Larry Nassar were given a voice to be able to talk about what happened to them and the harm that it caused out in the open. There is a catharsis in this. There is a difference between not being forced to talk about what happened, and not being allowed. Not all victims want to be silent, even if that silence is protective, and even if the victim is a child.

So much of my fear as a child about disclosing my monster was the way that once I talked about what happened to me, processes would unfold without my control or input. Like a can of worms I could not close once I opened them. This lack of agency compounds the initial harm, and that is not addressed at all in the book.

What Does Restorative Justice Look Like?

Now I come to my final point, and I think it’s the thing that first sparked my rage at this book, that spurred me to look deeper. This book talks a lot about rehabilitation for the “monsters”, but never actually examines what that could look like. At one point, early in the novel Jam reflects on how there are no more “free” monsters, that all the monsters have been locked away. Her father, Aloe equates this with prison and we are literally never given any information about the restorative justice practices that might dispute this. Which also sucks. As discussed in my first point, we all live lives where we will be both victim and victimizer. We will all cause harm. A world where we separate the “monsters” from society is the nightmare world of witch hunts and cancel culture that people talk about now, where one bad action can damn you, so you can never acknowledge the harm you’ve caused for fear of punishment. I do not want to live in a world that locks people away for causing harm.

At my core I am an abolitionist. I am an abolitionist because of the harm that was done to me and the systems that did nothing to stop it from happening again. The person who harmed me was imprisoned, and it did literally nothing to stop it from happening again. I want to abolish police, prisons, every vestige of our current carceral “justice system” that deals in violence, control and punishment, and the surrounding carceral institutions like psychiatry that seek to control and not care for people.

I think that abolition is the only way that we can create a world where, when harm happens (becuase we cannot control our way into a world where harm will never happen) we are able to discuss it openly, and find ways to repair that harm, both so that the victim can find a sense of safety again, and so that the victimizer will not continue to perpetrate harm.

In this book we are given a confusing vision of what restorative justice, “rehabilitation” and repair could look like. Our first introduction to the world, is a world where harm has been eliminated through violence. They took all the bad people and killed them or locked them away, we are told. Locked them away for some unspecific kind of rehabilitation. We are presented with a world where angels are in charge, the good guys, who we cannot criticize. Even when an “angel” is revealed to cause harm, it is still the angels who get to determine what justice is. They are the authority that we must defer to. This book concludes with a trial, or a hearing, they are practically indistinguishable, and the monster is sentenced to “rehabilitation” and a few new laws are passed. What rehabilitation might include is given less consideration than a footnote. Wild when we consider that the “monster” that we are presented with is a man, who was otherwise a kind, caring and upstanding member of the community, and the only answer that is offered is unspecific banishment.

This is a liberal approach to justice/abolition that relies on maintaining most of our current structures of power and reforming them. But it does not get to the heart of how we can create a kinder world. 

I was really hoping for a book that moved beyond this limited model, that reimagined what accountability in community could look like examining indigenous societies (that had no conception of the criminal), or at least current abolitionist arguments. But that is not what was presented.

Which is all to say, I was very disappointed in this book, and I think if you are looking for a truly abolitionist vision of the world Louise Erdich’s LaRose is one of the most fascinating explorations of harm and repair that I have ever read. Margaret Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts also has a great exploration of what an abolitionist view of repair could look like. This was not it, for me.