Marshmallow reviews The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Today Marshmallow reviews The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, first published in 2017.

Marshmallow’s Quick Take: If you appreciate books about racial injustice, family, friendship, growing up against adversity, and police brutality, then this is the book for you.

Marshmallow’s Summary (with Spoilers): Starr Carter attends a fancy prep school that is mostly White and wealthy but comes from a neighborhood (called “The Garden”) that is mostly Black and poor. These two distinct worlds create two distinct Starrs, one for Williamson Prep and one for Garden Heights. But she still feels like she doesn’t quite fit in in either place. So at a party, she finds comfort catching up with her childhood best friend Khalil whom she hasn’t seen for a while. But when a gun is fired at the party, she and Khalil leave and then get pulled over for no apparent reason. Khalil is instructed to get out. He does. He briefly leans over to check if Starr is okay. Then Khalil is shot by a police officer and everything changes forever. The police officer claims he thought Khalil was reaching for a weapon which turned out to be a hair brush. Khalil’s death becomes the center of attention. Starr faces a choice between staying silent or speaking out and placing herself and her family in danger. 

Marshmallow’s Review: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is very well written, and though it is about very challenging themes (police brutality and racism), I could not stop reading it once I started. The story is told from Starr’s perspective and voice, and you get a first-hand look at her inner world as well as how she switches personalities and voices (see code-switching on Wikipedia) when she travels between her two worlds.

The title of the book is the beginning of the sentence whose initials spell THUG LIFE, an acronym created by Tupac Shakur and points to one of the important messages of the book: if you hate people from their birth just because they are black or poor or just different from you, if you give them hate from the time they are infants, it hurts everybody. Starr’s friend Khalil explains the quote right before his murder: “What society gives us as youth, it bites them in the [xxx] when we wild out.”

The book came out during the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, and it was received well by critics and readers alike. There was even a movie adaptation (see the trailer here). The book also became controversial in some places, where people argued that the themes were too volatile and the language too vulgar. I did not find the language inappropriate given the context of the story, though it might be not acceptable for parents of very young bunnies.

But I think that more mature bunnies should definitely read the book. It is provocative, to say the least, but it tells a story that is unfortunately too familiar today from the inside, in the voice of one who was there when it happened.

Marshmallow’s Rating: 100%.