“Now we have to somehow un-fuck everybody.”

Quick Review: This is a very good YA debut by Angie Thomas and it is important reading to be done in this cultural climate in the United States. Thomas clearly, and evocatively, brings the reader into the layered life of a black teen in today’s United States with its systemic racism. It reminded me of of my own history, and my lived experience, and grew it out. But it isn’t a primer in the way that Between the World and Me is, it is a story, a beautiful narrative of coming to terms with things that are impossible to come to terms with all while living your life the best that you can. I highly suggest this and will be on the lookout for more of what Ms. Thomas writes.

Longer thoughts:

This book is made of lovely, delicate moments that add up to a complex whole. Thomas, with her first novel, takes on racism and police shootings through the eyes of her 16-year-old narrator, Starr Carter. Starr is an engaging narrator who straddles different worlds and in unpacking the kind of code switching life Starr leads, Thomas creates a sympathetic and complex protagonist.

There’s so much to notice in this book, so many layers to peel back. The Hate U Give masterfully covers dozens of topics, and with care. Through Starr’s narration we are exposed to what’s it like to be one of the only Black students in a private high school, life with rival gangs in your neighborhood, code switching and curating your persona based on where you are and who you are with, interracial dating, seeing your friend shot and killed, protests and discovering what purpose they serve and where the line is between protest and riot.

This is an outstanding novel for teens and adults to begin reckoning with what it might be like to witness, and be the victim of, injustice and violence. The nuanced way Thomas treats the shooting of Starr’s friend Khalil, and all the people involved provides any number of entry points for the reader. Thomas even gives nuance to the characters who express racist ideas, imbuing them with the reality of how their individual worldviews would be shaped.

Ms. Thomas also delivers readers a chance to engage in self-examination when it comes to racism and our response to the increase in police shootings of unarmed people of color. In the nearly 450 pages of this novel Thomas gives plenty of examples, but the one that stuck with me the most was the brewing, and then finally exploding, argument between Starr and her white friend Hailey. We have a problem in the United States with the use of the indefinite article in front of the word racist. For my generation of white folks (Oregon Trail Gen X/Millennials) we were raised with the notion that a person was “racist” if they were so demonstratively. What many of us have learned since is that this educational paradigm was wrong. It is possible, and staggeringly LIKELY, that we will all say and do racist things without being the bogeyman that we imagine “a racist” to be. Privilege makes us push back against it, we think to ourselves “I’m not the bad actor here, I’m just saying/thinking what other people are saying/thinking”. Angie Thomas pulls that string and unravels how indoctrinated our society is with the idea that “bad” kids who are acting like “thugs” somehow don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt while the “good” guys who are using “necessary force” must be presumed to be acting correctly. It is shameful, and it is unfortunately nothing new, but we do need to be talking about it and this book is an important component of the conversation, because as a reader you see Thomas call bullshit as she tears apart the idea of the “thug” by introducing us to Starr, and Khalil, and Seven, and Kenya, and Devante, and all of the other characters living in Garden Heights.

Structurally the book has several sections which jump forward in time, some small jumps, some larger. The pacing is built around how Starr must deal with the fallout of being the witness to Khalil’s murder. In this way Thomas gives a primer on the process of how extrajudicial killings by police officers are dealt with in the criminal justice system. It also shows in unmistakable light how the rage of watching unjust things happen turns into flat-out rage at the world around you, and how “thug” behavior of riots and looting occur.

The tension, the twists, the pauses, the resolutions, all of these left me content, but my world wasn’t shattered (see the four star rating). Thanks to the #weneeddiversebooks crew, of which Ms. Thomas is a part, we are getting the diverse books we need in our hands. You do need to read this one, even if YA isn’t your genre.