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Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give is a rare example of a raved-about YA book that is actually as good as everybody says that it is.
Starr, the protagonist, lives in a poor black neighborhood but attends a majority-white suburban prep school. In the first chapter, her childhood friend Khalil is driving her home from a party that she doesn't really want to be at when the police stop their car. The interaction goes badly. Khalil, unarmed, is shot, and dies.
The book takes place approximately today, in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement. Part of what makes the book work, of course, is that it's immensely of this moment, a part of an ongoing conversation. Khalil's death isn't a fictionalized version of the death of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown; those things have happened. Within the world of the story, the death of Khalil is not more or less important than any of the other deaths caused by the deadly racism in our country. It shouldn't be necessary to keep stating that this is an enormous and ongoing wrong, but, of course, it is necessary, and remains necessary.
But the other thing that makes the book stand out is the complexity and richness of the cast of characters. The neighborhood feels like a neighborhood. The people around Starr include her parents, her younger brother, and her older half-brother; her half-brother's other family, including his mother and abusive stepfather and two younger sisters; her cop uncle and his middle-class family; her neighbors; her school friends, and school kind-of-friends, and school acquaintances, some of whom are white and some of whom are not but also not black and all of whom react to ongoing events in different ways; her white boyfriend. All of these people's relationships with each other are in the process of being lived through, with weight to their pasts and possibility to their futures. The Hate U Give takes us through a fairly dramatic period in Starr's life and the lives of those around her, but it's a portion of the story, and not the only one there is to tell.
It's so easy, when writing, to focus on just the people who are necessary to tell the story that you want to tell and conveniently elide all the other dozens of people that any human being interacts with on a weekly basis, because they're not particularly important to this particular narrative and, you know, pacing. One love interest, one friend, one antagonist, etc. This book is definitely Starr's story, and the pacing moves along; still, in Thomas' narrative, everybody feels important. I would have appreciated the story of The Hate U Give even if the craft were less solid, but now I'll follow Thomas to whatever she does next, whether she keeps it up at this intensity or decides to pull a Hiromu Arakawa and spend the next ten years writing gentle rom-coms about kids at farm school.
Starr, the protagonist, lives in a poor black neighborhood but attends a majority-white suburban prep school. In the first chapter, her childhood friend Khalil is driving her home from a party that she doesn't really want to be at when the police stop their car. The interaction goes badly. Khalil, unarmed, is shot, and dies.
The book takes place approximately today, in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement. Part of what makes the book work, of course, is that it's immensely of this moment, a part of an ongoing conversation. Khalil's death isn't a fictionalized version of the death of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown; those things have happened. Within the world of the story, the death of Khalil is not more or less important than any of the other deaths caused by the deadly racism in our country. It shouldn't be necessary to keep stating that this is an enormous and ongoing wrong, but, of course, it is necessary, and remains necessary.
But the other thing that makes the book stand out is the complexity and richness of the cast of characters. The neighborhood feels like a neighborhood. The people around Starr include her parents, her younger brother, and her older half-brother; her half-brother's other family, including his mother and abusive stepfather and two younger sisters; her cop uncle and his middle-class family; her neighbors; her school friends, and school kind-of-friends, and school acquaintances, some of whom are white and some of whom are not but also not black and all of whom react to ongoing events in different ways; her white boyfriend. All of these people's relationships with each other are in the process of being lived through, with weight to their pasts and possibility to their futures. The Hate U Give takes us through a fairly dramatic period in Starr's life and the lives of those around her, but it's a portion of the story, and not the only one there is to tell.
It's so easy, when writing, to focus on just the people who are necessary to tell the story that you want to tell and conveniently elide all the other dozens of people that any human being interacts with on a weekly basis, because they're not particularly important to this particular narrative and, you know, pacing. One love interest, one friend, one antagonist, etc. This book is definitely Starr's story, and the pacing moves along; still, in Thomas' narrative, everybody feels important. I would have appreciated the story of The Hate U Give even if the craft were less solid, but now I'll follow Thomas to whatever she does next, whether she keeps it up at this intensity or decides to pull a Hiromu Arakawa and spend the next ten years writing gentle rom-coms about kids at farm school.
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