The Hate U Give
By Angie Thomas
Publication Year: 2017
Type: Fiction
Genre: contemporary
Read on 2019-03-06
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2019 Reading Survey ➞
★★★★★
I was expecting a trite, superficial YA book on racial justice and police brutality - and also honestly I was getting bombarded with ads for the movie at one point and was annoyed - but what I got was an incredibly nuanced, tightly written, complex and thorough story about both the politic/social issues and personal, emotional experiences around them. Angie Thomas wrote a book that the U.S. needs right now, and she was so smart with her characters - there was someone for everyone, coming from so many different backgrounds and perspectives, to identify with and grow with through the story. Getting into Starr's head and specifically reading about her relationship with her school friends got me thinking about race and my own relationship to anti-black racism like nothing has before. I think sometimes it's quite easy to understand issues of racism on an intellectual level, but peeling back all the ways in which you have internalized racism in your own life and relationships is so much harder because you don't even know its there. It takes work like this that does the impossible of putting you into the head and heart of someone else to see that. And the fact that this is a YA book makes it all the more powerful - it speaks so truthfully to young people and will hopefully impact the most and the most deeply that way.
I also appreciate that this book was clearly written by someone who was around during a very specific time of Tumblr. I absolutely heard about many major news stories through Tumblr in the early 2010s, and saw social movements unfold in online communities. Now that Tumblr is dead and current high schoolers are exclusively on Instagram and TikTok, I feel like a wizened 22 year old reading those bits of the book. Only 2000/2010s kids will know. HA.
See me review this book in this video!
