I finally got around to listening to “Monday’s Not Coming” this weekend.

I always wait until a day or two before the meeting to listen to the audiobook, so it’s fresh in my mind, but I got the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and it put me on my rump for a whole week, so I was in bed with terrible headaches not wanting to listen to anything or even open my eyes!

For me, this book was a great read!

I graduated from Howard University and lived in DC for several years, and at the end of my Army career and after getting out of the Army I lived in Virginia for many years before coming back to Pine Bluff, so I was familiar with southeast DC, the DC charter school system, Cardozo High School, Banneker High School, the other places Claudia mentioned, go-go music (which I never developed a liking for) and even the DC slang (lunching, bama, carrying me, etc.), so it was funny and fun to hear all that stuff again.

SPOILER ALERT!!! If you haven’t read/listened to the book yet, then don’t go any further, because I talked about the ending.

I was pretty sure Monday was dead, but it was a shock that she and her brother were in the dang freezer in the house for over a year!

It was even more shocking to me that Patty was going to leave Monday in the closet, and it was April who had the sense/nerve to put Monday in the freezer with August. However, if April hadn’t put Monday in the freezer the authorities would have found out sooner that the two children were dead and the two remaining children were in danger of being harmed by their mother.

A part of me wanted to blame April, but she was a child herself. Even though she was a teenager, she was still under 18. There was really nothing she could do for herself and/or Tuesday (and Monday before she was killed) other than tell someone, and black families drill into their kids “what happens in this house stays in this house,” so she was young and dumb and probably brainwashed and afraid of her mother, and since the dad wasn’t around (because it sounds like Patty kept him away) who could she turn to?

The book mentioned that April was trying to track down her aunt, so the children wouldn’t get split up again. Maybe if April had been able to find the aunt sooner, Monday wouldn’t have gotten killed, but then again who says the aunt would have been in a position to take the kids and/or who says the city would have given the kids to the aunt? It’s all a toss up when you get the state/city involved, and since DC isn’t a state that’s a whole other issue. Ugh!

I was thinking the story would have unfolded better if the author had told it in a linear fashion as opposed to skipping to before and after, but it actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it from Claudia’s point of view, and Claudia is the narrator, so it made perfect sense since Claudia was dyslexic and she processed information in a different way than people without dyslexia. I think that’s why it took her so long to keep the information straight in her head. She was processing everything non-linearly because of her learning disability.

I enjoyed the book very much!

Thanks for choosing it, Evelyn. ❤