Review: The Hate U Give

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another of my gifts from the individual novel project for my English classes over the last year. It has been a perennial selection, for good reason, over the last few years. It is a riveting story and a disturbing one in an altogether good way. It is a coming of age story, but one that admits of the complexities of race in America (and Canada) today.

I'll keep myself from spoilers, but the story centres on Starr Carter, a 16 year old African-American girl who comes from a poor neighbourhood, who attends an affluent and mostly white prep school. Starr finds herself between her two worlds, adapting to fit in at school with some skill, if not always straight-forwardly, but also feeling on the outside in her own community. The precarious balance she's striking at the beginning of the book is shattered when she witnesses the police shooting of her childhood friend. What follows is an exploration of trauma, individual and communal, and of the racial divide as Starr struggles to honour her friend and speak out against the injustice of his death. The result is a painful story, but one that contains real hope, but hope in the struggle.

This book has, of course, been pretty controversial because it confronts the problem of police violence and racism in a way that makes people, especially white people uncomfortable. And, as a middle-aged white guy, I was uncomfortable, but, I think, the right kind of uncomfortable, approaching a world that I have no experience of, but need to learn about. Angie Thomas' book does that and gives a compelling story, with characters which are hard not to love and a hope that, maybe, just maybe, that we'll find a way to heal our divisions.

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