Monet’s is an after-school café where Hannah Baker writes poetry, takes breaks from it, and eventually finds a reason to begin again. The place holds both the routine of private work and a small, tentative turn toward renewed happiness.

A Place to Write

A couple of days a week, Hannah goes to Monet’s after school with a spiral notebook she has bought to keep her poems together. She writes one or two poems at a time, making the café a recurring setting for a practice still taking shape. Her first attempts strike her as sad and straightforward, with little depth or subtlety, though she thinks some turn out fairly well.

The notebook’s first poem stays with her without effort: she memorizes it and cannot shake it from her head. Its greeting-card imagery—love as ocean, desert, star, and flight—makes her self-conscious, but also reveals the uncomplicated earnestness of her early writing. At Monet’s, poetry is not yet a polished craft; it is something Hannah can try, keep, and carry away in memory.

A Pause and a Return

Later, Hannah sometimes stops at Monet’s for hot chocolate on her way home. She starts homework or reads, but no longer writes poetry. The café remains part of her routine even while the activity that once defined her visits has fallen away; her pause from writing is also described as a need for a break from herself.

After several weeks, Hannah decides to return to poetry in an effort to make herself happy. She imagines writing bright, sunshiny poems, a deliberate contrast with the sadness of her first attempts. A flyer at Monet’s, depicting two women, advertises a free course called Poetry: To Love Life. The course promises not only to teach love of poetry but to use poetry to help people love themselves better.

From Café to Community Room

The flyer redirects Hannah’s interest from solitary writing toward a shared course. She signs up, and the course is held in the community room at the public library, not at Monet’s itself. The café’s importance lies in this hinge: it is where Hannah’s earlier writing routine and her later decision to seek a more hopeful relationship with poetry meet.