In The Beast Anthony “Spoon” Witherspoon is leaving Harlem for a Connecticut prep school. He leaves behind his friends and his girlfriend Gabi. While he is at the school, he thinks about how people’s lives are different and when he returns to his home, it seems like it is different than he remembers. Gabi’s mom is dying and Gabi seems different somehow. When Spoon finds a needle in her room, he knows the truth - that Gabi is using heroin.

Spoon and Gabi have a great love and when he left, Spoon was sure they would be married. Drugs are something he never expected could happen to her, and he knows that if she could fall to them, anyone could. He tries to balance his new school responsibilities with his need to help Gabi get clean. Spoon and Gabi’s relationship wavers as they feel the distance growing, but they try to keep it going through this hard time.

Myers presents the tension in his book in a believable way. There is the racial tension and attitudes of his friends towards other races. There is even class tension between people of the same race. There is also the tension that comes from knowing someone you love is in pain and in danger, and there is only so much you can do about it.

Myers has Spoon thinking in such thick poetic style that it is sometimes hard to follow or even a little bit unrealistic for a teenage boy. On the other hand, Spoon is very smart and his girlfriend is a poet. Booklist says, “Spoon narrates in a voice that's artistic and colloquial, his thoughts tumbling out as poetry, and readers may miss the precise sense of some passages.” This is true, but it does not take away from the love in this book that readers can feel as they turn the pages. Not quite wrapped up in a happy ending, The Beast presents drug use in a way that shows how they can affect everyone who comes in contact with them.

Engberg, Gillian. 2003. Review of The Beast in Booklist.