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For example, Starr hides her white boyfriend from her father. But each of these plotlines is inevitably complicated by race. The Hate U Give has many of the markers of a typical young-adult novel, too: At times, Starr feels judged and out of place in school, she’s navigating a friendship with a “mean girl,” and is a year into her first real romantic relationship. Thomas’s intimate writing style taps fully into Starr’s shock, pain, and outrage during the shooting and its aftermath. Thomas’s novel keenly understands the dangers of defaulting to the cop/vigilante versus “thug” framing device: The deceased get put on trial, rather than their killers. And it illustrates how young people of color who might speak out to defend their late friends are unfairly criticized, as happened to Rachel Jeantel when she testified against her friend Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. The novel goes on to raise cogent and credible counter-arguments to the flattening narratives often presented by authorities and echoed by many media outlets in shooting cases involving young black males.Īs a book written for teens, The Hate U Give reminds readers of just how often racialized violence is carried out against that age group (Michael Brown was 18 when he was killed Trayvon Martin was 17 and not-yet teen Tamir Rice was 12). After the shooting, a new narrative-one that paints Khalil as a drug dealer threatening a cop-surfaces, but an emboldened Starr challenges this simplistic framing of her friend. Starr, familiar with perceptions of her neighborhood, community, and herself, code-switches to adapt to her environment and others’ expectations. This question of appearance versus reality recurs throughout The Hate U Give. But, as Khalil explains to Starr, just minutes before the cop pulls them over, it’s really an indictment of systemic inequality and hostility: “What society gives us as youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out.”
The acronym tattooed across Tupac’s abdomen could be read as an embrace of a dangerous lifestyle. Thomas’s book derives its title from the rapper Tupac Shakur’s philosophy of THUG LIFE-which purportedly stands for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody”-and it’s a motif the novel returns to a few times.
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Now in its third consecutive week at number one on The New York Times bestseller list for young-adult novels, Thomas’s debut novel offers an incisive and engrossing perspective of the life of a black teenage girl as Starr’s two worlds converge over questions of police brutality, justice, and activism. ‘The Timeline You’re All Living in Is About to Collapse’ Amanda Wicks For years, she has spent her weekdays at a private, majority-white school, where she explains, “I’m cool by default because I’m one of the only black kids there.” Back at home, she lives with her father “Big Mav,” a former gang-member who wants to make their crime-ridden neighborhood a better place, and her mother Lisa, who wants to move away in order to keep her family safe. The incident also means that the carefully built-up boundary between Starr’s two worlds begins to crumble. By the time she’s 16, Starr Carter, the protagonist of the book, has lost two of her childhood friends to gun violence: one by a gang drive-by, and one by a cop.Īs the sole witness to her friend Khalil’s fatal shooting by a police officer, Starr is overwhelmed by the pressure of testifying before a grand jury and the responsibility of speaking out in Khalil’s memory. The last words of Eric Garner, adopted and amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, echo again in the early pages of Angie Thomas’s young-adult novel The Hate U Give.