Monday's Not Coming

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2018

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Symbols & Motifs

Journals

Monday’s and Claudia’s journals give each girl a voice as she comes of age, serving as a place to record thoughts they can’t express to others. Claudia’s journal symbolizes her craving to be an adult in the way she thinks she should be. She wishes she could write and read with ease, but she struggles to form the words in her entries. The journal also serves as a connection to her missing best friend, which spurs Claudia to write even though she finds writing challenging.

For Monday, the journal is a lifeline. She can’t ask for help or tell people she is being abused for fear of being separated from her siblings. The journal is the only thing she can confide in, and she writes everything down in vivid detail. Yet the journal isn’t entirely her own: She picks a pink journal for herself, even though purple is her true favorite color, demonstrating her deep commitment to and love for Claudia.

Colors

As someone with dyslexia, Claudia finds it easier to categorize people by a representative color rather than in linguistic terms. She understands that people have different perceptions of reality, just as everyone perceives color differently: “Some see rose and magenta, and others see coral and salmon. When at the end of the day, it’s just regular old pink” (1-2).

Claudia’s color coding helps her deal with intricacies of experience as well as her understanding of individuals’ complicated and seemingly contrasting aspects of identity. She portrays Mrs. Charles as a yellow of “bright, cheerful, golden rays of sunshine” but notes that her “banana peel would start to rot” if left out in the sun too long (93). Even though Mrs. Charles does horrible things, certain aspects of her are beautiful and life giving. Even though Claudia can’t see the extent to which Mrs. Charles has lost her sanity, Claudia perceives the duality within her.

The girls also us color as a way to express themselves outwardly. Monday colors her hair, and the girls paint their nails.

At first, Claudia sees Monday as red: “Crisp, striking, vivid, you couldn’t miss her—a bull’s-eye in the room, a crackling flame. I saw so much red that it blinded me to any flags” (41). In fact, Monday’s entire life is a red flag, yet no one sees it. After the hypervisibility of Monday’s body after her death, and then her subsequent invisibility because she is gone, Monday’s color changes from red to black in Claudia’s mind.

Breadcrumbs

The healthy support Claudia’s mother embodies is seen in her insistence on breadcrumbs: Claudia leaves a trail so her parents know where she is at all times. She checks in with different teachers and librarians after school so that if she were to disappear, like Monday did, her parents would know immediately. When she was trapped in the Charles house, Claudia knew she hadn’t left breadcrumbs. She knew her parents were worried, and she feared no one would think to search for her at Monday’s house.

As she searches for Monday, Claudia looks for any breadcrumbs that Monday may have left behind. She investigates the books Monday checked out from the library, viewing Monday’s obsession with Flowers in the Attic is a cry for help. Ironically, Monday displayed highly visible breadcrumbs that others should have seen—visible bruises and marks, obvious neglect, the fact that the Charles children were taken from their home by CFSA for a period—yet she had no one in her life, save Claudia, who cared to follow them and find out what happened to her.