When your 14 year old boy, who doesn’t read fiction, tells you to read The Hate U Give because “I think you’ll like it, Mum”, you don’t decline. You pick that book up and you devour it. And it wasn’t hard to like this book although in a lot of ways, there’s not a lot to like.
With that contradictory statement, let me explain. The book concerns itself with Starr who witnesses the shooting of her childhood friend, Khalil. That in itself is a heartbreaking tale, only it’s not some street killing: he’s killed by a cop. A white cop and Starr and Khalil are black. Yes, this opens up a whole other story. Add that it’s in a deprived neighbourhood called Garden Heights, plagued by drugs and gangs and you’re reading a novel of our times, for sure.
Angie Thomas’ book covers many things. It is a book about a shooting and injustice but it is also a book about family and community and coming together; it’s also a coming-of-age book and all of the awkwardness, excitement and anxiety that comes with being a teen; it’s about roots and identity and hopes and aspirations and whether wanting a better life means leaving behind what you know and moving elsewhere, although it may be seen as betrayal; it’s a book about desperation, violence and having nowhere to turn and what do you do when you have nothing and no-one to help you but you still have to live somehow?
So when I say there’s not a lot to like, it’s because a mirror has been held up to society and there’s a whole lot of ugly reflected back. The book is good. It is a great read and Thomas’ storytelling is vivid, right; her characters are rounded and the narrative flows. It’s a book you can read quickly and fluidly. But it is hard-hitting in what it depicts and doing it through the eyes of a black teenage girl heightens that vulnerability. It is a social treatise for things to change; for a long hard look to be taken to see the people behind statistics and the families who are struggling, in communities that receive no investment, and to not give up on them or leave them to decline.
Read it. You won’t be disappointed. I was especially pleased that Starr is depicted as strong, despite being scared. She has integrity and emotional intelligence and Thomas shows her conflicted emotions adroitly.
Despite its subject matter, it is a hopeful book. Light is hitting that mirror of ugly like a searchlight and showing there’s nowhere to hide and in these dark days in which we live, we need to read books like this to see the human element that we all share beneath our skin.
Rachel Rating: 5 blooming stars!
Scuffed Granny 