The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas | Review
Publication: New York, NY : Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2017]
Genre: Young Adult Fiction, Race Relations Fiction
Pages: 444 | 11 hours 45 minutes
Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Audiobook, eBook
Source: MCL
It’s a common screenwriting rule that if there’s a gun in the first act, then it must go off in the third. This mantra has as much to do with foreshadowing as with setting your audience’s expectations. On my second read-through of Thomas’s The Hate U Give, I realized she had set such a stage, incorporating all the props that she had perfectly situated around her characters with an almost guru-like subtly of foresight.
We learn early that the suspected “gun” in the car door of the book’s initial victim of racial violence turns out to only have been a hairbrush. With this as the setting, the weapon that is at last seen firing in the book’s third act is the voices of those repeatedly subjected to racial prejudice. The idea seems to become, then, that a person’s most valuable weapon is their ability to speak out against injustice.
The main character of Thomas’s book reminded me of my first (and only, as I guiltily haven’t re-read To Kill a Mocking Bird since high school) impressions of what Harper Lee was trying to expose about the ugliness of societal prejudices through her characters. Thankfully, Thomas is able to do this without the white-savior complex that Lee’s editors ultimately pushed for in their publication of To Kill a Mocking Bird. In both these books, however, there’s a tension set early that the audience longs to see manifest in the resolution of an explosion. Yet how can we explode toward such a resolution without more death resulting from anger’s fallout?
I loved the honesty Thomas’s story presents throughout the narrative when dealing with the often-at-odds demands for respect versus forgiveness. Her main character has to decide what friends really matter to her, and this beyond the color of their skin. In this way, Thomas shows both sides of prejudice, and how saying you’re sorry another person feels the way they do is grossly insufficient in the realm of coming to grips with true understanding and actual communication toward growth.
I hope this book is read and taught in high schools for many generations to come, since the world Lee was writing about has certainly changed, or at least is still trying to. I also hope our society can find ways to explode toward a culture where perspectives can be heard before the gun shots that have taken too many lives already.
readers' advisory blog 