Monday’s Not Coming Study Guide

Tiffany Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn Heights, New York. She knew at four years old she wanted to be a writer, after she spelled the word “nose” correctly all by herself. Her parents moved the family around New York several times when Jackson was a child, and she enjoyed many vacations in Kingston, Jamaica, to stay with her grandparents. She attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and then earned her master’s degree from The New School in new York. Her degrees are in film and media studies. Her first young adult novel, Allegedly, made it onto several “best of YA” lists after its 2017 publication, as did her novel Monday’s Not Coming. When she’s not writing, Jackson works as a production manager in television. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Jackson has said in interviews that the events of Monday’s Not Coming were loosely inspired by two real-life cases of mothers murdering their children. In both cases, months passed before anyone noticed that the children were missing. Many details of the abuse Monday and her siblings suffer come from a 2015 case from Detroit, Michigan: the mother, Mitchelle Blair, abused all four of her children, murdered her 13-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son, and hid their bodies in a chest freezer with the help of her oldest daughter. The 2009 Washington, D.C., case concerning Banita Jacks, who murdered all four of her children, inspired more of the issues the novel explores in terms of identifying and preventing child abuse. In this case, Child Protective Services and the local police department didn’t follow up on previous neglect charges, didn’t check in when the children didn’t show up for school, and ignored a teacher’s repeated calls to report neglect and suspicions that something had gone seriously wrong. In both of these real-life cases, the children’s bodies were only discovered when the mothers were evicted from their homes. The Jacks case inspired legislation in D.C. allowing police departments, CPS, and schools to relax confidentiality guidelines and communicate more openly in cases of suspected abuse or neglect. Jackson hopes that Monday’s Not Coming will help raise awareness of the prevalence of cases of Black children, and especially Black girls, going missing, an issue that gained momentum in 2017 when the hashtag #missinggirlsDC went viral.

Monday’s Not Coming is an issue novel, or a teen novel tackling complex or difficult subject matter—in this case, child abuse and filicide. Issues across the genre vary from mental illness (John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down) and intimate partner violence (Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland), to suicide (Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why) and eating disorders (Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls). Within the novel itself, Claudia mentions a number of books that Monday read that also deal with abusive home situations. These include Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, and most notably, V. C. Andrews’s 1979 novel, Flowers in the Attic. In interviews, Tiffany Jackson has said she wanted to differentiate Monday’s Not Coming from novels that employ what essayist Alice Bolin (Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession) terms the trope of the “dead girl”: the deceased female in a novel, podcast, or TV show whose character isn’t fleshed out, and is instead treated more as a prop. Bolin mentions novels like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that play into this trope, in addition to true crime podcasts like Serial. Jackson has written two other novels in addition to Monday’s Not Coming, both of which deal with murder and violence. Her debut novel, Allegedly, is about a girl accused of murdering an infant, while in Let Me Hear a Rhyme, three Brooklyn teens promote their murdered friend’s rap tracks.