Child Abuse Theme Analysis

Monday’s Not Coming follows 13-year-old Claudia, who returns from a summer away from home excited to start eighth grade with her best friend, Monday. But Monday doesn’t return Claudia’s calls or show up at school—and though Claudia spends the next several months searching tirelessly for Monday, it seems that nobody knows or cares where Monday went, or if she’s okay. The following spring, Claudia discovers that while she was gone over the summer, Monday was the victim of a horrendous crime: Monday’s mother, Mrs. Charles, murdered Monday and her little brother, August. With this discovery, things that once seemed a bit odd to Claudia suddenly become significant: Monday’s bruises supposedly acquired falling out of the bed and her affinity for novels about child abuse, for instance. Monday’s Not Coming shows that it’s shockingly for outside onlookers to explain away evidence of abuse, which only allows the abuse to continue and, as in Monday and August’s case, escalate.

Monday’s Not Coming shows how easy it can be for a person with privilege to incorrectly interpret signs of abuse and neglect, in part because abuse is so far from their own lived experience. The novel’s “One Year Before the Before” timeline is peppered with asides and observations that, once it’s revealed that Monday is being abused at home, read as extremely sinister: Monday has bruises that “look like she’s been beaten by an army of trolls”; she comes to school once smelling of urine, obviously dehydrated (as evidenced by her white tongue and chapped lips), and unable to concentrate; and, at times, Monday seems more afraid of Mrs. Charles than Claudia thinks is normal. But Claudia also lives a comparatively privileged life, and so it never seems to cross her mind that these might be signs of abuse. So while she finds Monday’s massive bruise concerning, for instance, she tells herself that kids play rough and sometimes bruise and scar. Or when she notices Monday’s fear of Mrs. Charles, she tells herself that all kids are afraid of their parents to some degree. And Claudia makes no effort to try to explain away Monday’s state when she comes to school smelly, dehydrated, and out of it. She simply can’t come up with any plausible reason why Monday would be in such a state—but still, she doesn’t seem to suspect abuse.

The novel portrays adults in powerful positions ignoring evidence of abuse—adults who, the novel suggests, have more power than Claudia to intervene. For instance, in the “Before” timeline, Claudia eventually comes to realize that the school administration has known for at least a year that Monday’s home situation was unsafe and neglectful. Ms. Orman, the school nurse, even went so far as to file a report that resulted in Monday and her siblings being temporarily removed from the house for their safety. But when Monday and her siblings were returned to Mrs. Charles a month later, the school seemed to mostly drop the issue. This shows that the school had the ability to protect the Charles children but didn’t continue to follow up after the matter was supposedly resolved. Claudia’s favorite teacher, Ms. Valente, even calls the school out on its failure to follow up with the Charles children when they don’t show up to school in the “Before” timeline. She icily tells the secretary that “back in New York, when a student doesn’t show up for class nor register for school, the school follows up. Is that not the case here?” But the secretary, Ms. Clark, brushes off Ms. Valente’s comment and insists that plenty of students didn’t return for the current school year because their families could no longer afford the rising rents in the area. This suggests that the school is willing to offer simplistic—though perhaps, not untrue—explanations for what might otherwise be a concerning disappearance. Because Monday’s disappearance happens in the midst of many other students not returning to school, it’s easy for the school to come up with a plausible explanation. Further, even the police seem unwilling to acknowledge evidence of neglect and abuse when Claudia goes to the local station for help. Detective Carson insists that girls like Monday often run away rather than ask for help—and it’s not his responsibility to try to track them down if their parents don’t report them as missing. Wherever Claudia goes, she finds that people are quick to provide simplistic answers to what might have happened to Monday rather than considering that Monday was in danger and needed their help.

Ultimately, the novel shows that because so many people were willing to look the other way, the abuse that Monday and her siblings suffered was able to continue—and ultimately resulted in August and Monday’s deaths. When Claudia finds it concerning that Monday seems to have suddenly vanished without a trace, the adults in her life come up with all sorts of seemingly plausible explanations for Monday’s absence: she’s with her father, she’s with her aunt, she’s homeschooling, or she just doesn’t want to be Claudia’s friend anymore. Years of ignoring or superficially acknowledging that Monday was suffering abuse and neglect means that the school and the Charles family’s social workers are willing to buy seemingly any explanation that would be reasonable for a family without a documented history of neglect. With this, the novel underscores that child abuse is uncomfortable to think about, which makes it easy to ignore. But the novel shows that in order to keep abuse from escalating and to keep children safe, it’s essential to take signs of abuse and neglect seriously when they emerge—no matter how comforting a simpler explanation might be.