The Hate U Give Enters the Ranks of Great YA Novels
The bestselling young-adult book by Angie Thomas looks at police violence through the eyes of a teen girl.
“They finally put a sheet over Khalil. He can’t breathe under it. I can’t breathe.”
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. 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.
As 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 incident also means that the carefully built-up boundary between Starr’s two worlds begins to crumble. 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.
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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.
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. The acronym tattooed across Tupac’s abdomen could be read as an embrace of a dangerous lifestyle. 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.”
This question of appearance versus reality recurs throughout The Hate U Give . Starr, familiar with perceptions of her neighborhood, community, and herself, code-switches to adapt to her environment and others’ expectations. 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. 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.
As 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). 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. 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.
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. But each of these plotlines is inevitably complicated by race. For example, Starr hides her white boyfriend from her father. “I mean, anytime he finds out a black person is with a white person, suddenly something’s wrong with them,” Starr explains. “I don’t want him looking at me like that.” She’s wary, too, of sharing her role in the investigation at school because she doesn’t trust one of her closest friends to be sympathetic to her situation, and she feels self-conscious about the easy stereotyping of her neighborhood as “the ghetto.”
Thomas’s intimate writing style and the novel’s first-person perspective taps fully into Starr’s shock, pain, and outrage during the shooting and its aftermath. As a result, The Hate U Give allows some readers to see the complexity of their lives mirrored in literature; for others who may be removed from Starr’s experience or haven’t lived through similar tragedies, it can help generate deeper understanding.
In addition to being an engagingly written story, Thomas’s novel is a vital new contribution to the white-dominated publishing industry. Lee and Low Books’s 2015 Diversity survey found that about 80 percent of industry respondents were Caucasian. And while the number of black characters in children’s books has grown over the past decade, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that the number of books written by black authors has held relatively steady. In 2016, out of 3,400 new children’s books counted, 278 were about African Americans—a record for 12 years of surveying. But, out of the thousands of books the center receives, the number of African American writers has hovered between 70 and 100 for the same time period.
Appealing to readers across age, not just race, is a goal for Thomas as well. In a recent interview with Cosmopolitan , she explained , “‘Young adult’ is a critical age, and I knew that if I showed Starr going through these types of things, I could provide a mirror for some young adults and a window for adults—a lot of [whom] read young adult books—who might bring open hearts to a story that I told from her perspective, when they might normally look at a topic like this and say, ‘No.’” But thanks to Thomas’s absorbing storytelling, those who read The Hate U Give will be right beside Starr, grappling with understanding entrenched prejudice, where it comes from, and what role she—and those at home—have in exposing and combatting it.
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The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas is a look into what a lot of black communities go through in the United States. The speaker is a girl named Starr Carter who is sixteen and lives in a neighborhood called Garden Heights. Her friend, Khalil, has an altercation with the cops and ends up being shot. From that point on, there are protests at Garden ...
The Hate U Give is one of those books. I could tell you that this book is inspired by the "Black Lives Matter" movement. I could tell you that it rips unapolegetically into a subject that needed to be ripped into - the shootings of unarmed black people by police officers, as well as racial bias in the justice system.
The Hate U Give is a didactic issues novel for teenagers. It is also a good book. Those two categories intersect only rarely, but The Hate U Give — a debut novel by Angie Thomas — manages the ...
The Hate U Give Review 'The Hate U Give' is a book that you're going to love. From its opening lines to the struggles Starr Carter had in the book, a reader is met with constant twists and turns. The issue of police brutality and racism is widely addressed. Other contemporary issues like racial profiles were widely discussed in the book.
Kirkus Prize. finalist. New York Times Bestseller. IndieBound Bestseller. Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter is a black girl and an expert at navigating the two worlds she exists in: one at Garden Heights, her black neighborhood, and the other at Williamson Prep, her suburban, mostly white high school. Walking the line between the two becomes ...
As 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 ...
September 8, 2017. The Hate U Give is a book that everyone should read. Not only does it delve into the deep murky waters of many heavy topics—racism, white privilege, racial stereotyping, and police violence to name a few, but it also gives the world a glimpse into black culture and showcases what black people go through in America. Eight hours.
Review: "Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. The key is to never stop doing right.". Riveting, emotionally fraught and heartbreakingly honest, The Hate U Give is one of the most powerful YA contemporaries I've read till date. You know, all the hype and attention this book has been getting, all those ...
The Hate U Give. by Angie Thomas. Publication Date: September 4, 2018. Genres: Fiction. Hardcover: 512 pages. Publisher: Balzer + Bray. ISBN-10: 0062872346. ISBN-13: 9780062872340. Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends.
The most highly anticipated book of 2017, the debut YA novel from author Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give is a heartbreakingly gripping, honest, furious read that places injustice and inequality on the page and demands you laugh, cry, rage, and act now to show the world the meaning behind the movement that inspired it, that Black Lives Matter.
Summary. Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.
The Hate U Give. 464p. HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray. Feb. 2017. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9780062498533. Gr 8 Up -After Starr and her childhood friend Khalil, both black, leave a party together, they are pulled over by a white police officer, who kills Khalil. The sole witness to the homicide, Starr must testify before a grand jury that will decide ...
This information about The Hate U Give was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter.Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication.
— School Library Journal (starred review) "The Hate U Give is an important and timely novel that reflects the world today's teens inhabit. Starr's struggles create a complex character, and Thomas boldly tackles topics like racism, gangs, police violence, and interracial dating. This topical, necessary story is highly recommended for all ...
The book is called "The Hate U Give." It's a hotly anticipated book. It's gotten rave reviews, and it's Angie Thomas' debut novel. She joins us now from Jackson, Miss. Welcome to the program.
The Hate U Give Book Review. "Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. The key is to never stop doing right.". The Hate U Give is a young adult novel whose protagonist, sixteen-year-old- Starr, witnesses the murder of her friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. She is shocked and deeply heart-broken, but ...
Review: Stunning, powerful, and shines a light on an issue that needs to be discussed.The Hate U Give is a book that everyone is raving about. I don't think I've seen a bad review of this book. The Hate U Give is a fairly new release, it came out in February, and it has massively high ratings on both Amazon and Goodreads. The book is told in first-person, narrated by sixteen-year-old Starr ...
Read Full Review >>. Rave Constance Grady, Vox. The Hate U Give is a didactic issues novel for teenagers. It is also a good book. Those two categories intersect only rarely, but The Hate U Give — a debut novel by Angie Thomas — manages the balancing act with aplomb ... It was probably inevitable that someone would write a YA novel about ...
The story starts with Starr going to a party in her neighborhood with her half brother, Seven's sister Kenya. Starr feels isolated at the party and ends up reconnecting with her childhood best ...
Book review of The Hate U Give. The Hate U Give is essentially a coming of age story in the present American scenario, dealing with racism, bullying and violence. It is inspired by the 'Black Lives Matter' movement, obviously but is much more than that. It is an honest account of a strong black family that has nothing to do with the gangs ...
The Hate U Give. by Angie Thomas. High School Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins 453 pp. 2/17 978--06-249853-3 $17.99. Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter lives a life many African American teenagers can relate to: a life of double consciousness. Caught between her rough, predominantly black neighborhood and the "proper," predominantly white prep ...
age 16+. The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas is a look into what a lot of black communities go through in the United States. The speaker is a girl named Starr Carter who is sixteen and lives in a neighborhood called Garden Heights. Her friend, Khalil, has an altercation with the cops and ends up being shot. From that point on, there are protests ...
Richard Brody reviews "The Hate U Give,"directed by George Tillman, Jr., and starring Amandla Sternberg, an explicitly political movie that advocates a manifestly progressive view of its subjects.