Why ‘The Hate U Give’ is One of the Most Important Books Ever Written
I haven’t stopped thinking about Angie Thomas’ ‘The Hate U Give’ since I read it two years ago. Here’s why it’s a modern classic.
The Story
The Hate U Give tells of a sixteen-year-old African-American female who sees a cop gun down one of her best friends and goes on to speak out about the injustice of what happened. The book is told in first person, present tense, from the protagonist Starr’s perspective.
Starr Carter is a sixteen-year-old who attends a mostly white private high school and yet lives in a poor black neighborhood. She has to be two different people, trying to fit in the best she can at the prep school with her white friends and trying to stay close to her black friends and family at home.
One night she spends time at a party with her best friend Khalil, a black man who’s also sixteen, and when he drives her home, a cop pulls the car over, asks Khalil to step out of the vehicle, and within seconds, shoots Khalil dead on the side of the road, Starr screaming but trying to hold herself together in the passenger seat.
In the coming days, Starr grieves the loss of her beloved Khalil, as does everyone else in her…
