The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “A hairbrush is NOT a gun!” First, I love the voice(s) and manner of audiobook reader Bahni Turpin, who really enhances Angie Thomas’ YA family romance race novel The Hate U Give (2017). The story is told (in de rigueur YA present tense) by 16-year-old Starr Carter, whose home is in the Garden Heights “ghetto,” where shootings, robberies, and drugs are common and normal jobs, well-equipped schools, and social services rare. When she was ten, her best friend Natasha was shot and killed while playing at an open fire hydrant, after which Starr’s parents put her and her younger and older brothers in the mostly white Williamson Prep school in the mostly white (and largely gated) Riverton Hills community 45 minutes away. As a result, Starr has been dividing herself into two personas in two worlds, Garden Heights Starr and Williamson Prep Starr, unable to speak her natural language or show her true feelings to her school friends. In the beginning of the story, she loses another childhood best friend, Khalil Harris, her first crush, when a white policeman pulls them over after a party and shoots Khalil three times in the back as he’s reaching for his hairbrush and asking Starr if she’s OK. The traumatic experience sends Starr wrestling with her guilt over having abandoned Khalil after going to the white school, with her awakening social conscience, and with her desire to keep a low profile as the only eyewitness to the shooting. As she watches the ensuing protests and riots over the killing (called “the incident” by the police, “the murder” by an activist attorney), gets interviewed by the police and the DA, and deals with her family members and friends, she finds it increasingly difficult to keep her two worlds separate. Will the merging of her two worlds be a wreck or a metamorphosis? Will she use her voice or remain safely anonymous? Will Khalil get justice, or will his killer get off scot-free? Will her father let her mother move the family out of Garden Heights to be safe or insist on staying to improve the community? Will their Garden Heights grocery store remain untouched by the riots? Will her complicated family grow closer or implode? The way Thomas answers such questions makes for a page-turning novel that is topical with the police killings of black people while staying universal with the relationships between family members and friends of highly wired teenagers. The novel depicts African American culture and human nature while dealing with interracial problems and enrichments. The book is not an anti-police diatribe, as Starr’s beloved surrogate father Uncle Carlos is a cop who genuinely wants to help Garden Heights and regrets temporarily assuming the worst of Khalil after he’s killed. Moreover, there’s lots of humor throughout, especially in the conversations between Starr and her family members and friends, which Angie Thomas writes with a fine-tuned ear for how kids and adults think and talk. There are funny scenes, like when Starr’s ex-gang banger and ex-con Black Panther and Malcom X idolizing father explains why Harry Potter is about gangs or discovers her *white* boyfriend Chris (“Y'all act like this dude been around a minute”), or when Starr and company tell Chris strange white behaviors so he tries to tell them strange black behaviors. And Starr’s salty grandmother steals any scene she’s in. While telling a realistic story about race, violence, and voice, the novel presses a lot of YA buttons, channeling a bit of Harry Potter (with the commentary on Rowling’s series and the outsider at school setting), a bit of the Hunger Games (with the first-person present-tense narration and themes relating to media and image), and a bit of Twilight (with the high school romance between apparently mismatched but ideally suited couple). Unfortunately, Thomas also indulges in the YA genre’s Righteous Punch of the Asshole, when Starr has had enough of her self-centered, manipulative, defensive, racist Williamson friend Hailey. Starr’s three-day suspension and her mother’s, Just-because-someone-says-something-you-don’t-like-doesn’t-mean-you-should-punch-them, are drowned out by the approval she gets from her father, brother, “sister,” friend, gang members, and author. In addition to referencing much popular culture (e.g., Starr’s beloved Jordan basketball shoes, Drake, Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, IHOP, Tumblr, Taco Bell), the novel depicts much African American culture, from Black Jesus, Huey Newton, dap, and “the Talk” about how to act when the police stop you if you’re black, to spicy Black English and slang like “a’ight” (all right) and “You just mad he threw you out,” “Loud-ass music,” “Giving Denasia Allen some serious stank-eye,” and “It's dope to be black until it's hard to be black.” She also writes some neat figures of speech, like Rosalie is “an African queen, and we are blessed to be in her presence,” “Suddenly I'm Eve in the garden after she ate the fruit,” and “’Love you’ isn’t as forward or aggressive as ‘I love you.’ ‘Love you’ can slip up on you, sure, but it doesn’t make an in-your-face-slam dunk. More like a nice jump shot.” And life wisdom, like “What's the point of having a voice if you're going to be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?” “People make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them,” and especially Tupac’s, THUG LIFE: “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone.” Maybe Starr’s family is a little too good to be true. She says at one point, “Embarrassing dancing and dysfunction aside, my family is not too bad,” and despite their arguments, they are (almost too) ideally supportive. I wonder how the novel would be if her family were truly broken like Khalil’s. Although I like the presence of Chris, who gives white me an outsider’s view of the black culture of the novel, I also think that Thomas takes the easy way out by not writing any scenes with his white parents. On the other hand, I think Devante (a Khalil-like Garden Heights youth from another broken family) is an unnecessary distraction during the climax. Anyway, overall, Thomas tells a suspenseful, moving, funny, and necessary story, and I’d like now to read her more recent Garden Heights novel Concrete Rose about Starr’s father when he was a teen. View all my reviews
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