But, as Khalil explains to Starr, just minutes before the cop pulls them over, it’s really an indictment of systemic inequality and hostility: “What society gives us as youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out.” The acronym tattooed across Tupac’s abdomen could be read as an embrace of a dangerous lifestyle. Thomas’s book derives its title from the rapper Tupac Shakur’s philosophy of THUG LIFE-which purportedly stands for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody”-and it’s a motif the novel returns to a few times. Now in its third consecutive week at number one on The New York Times bestseller list for young-adult novels, Thomas’s debut novel offers an incisive and engrossing perspective of the life of a black teenage girl as Starr’s two worlds converge over questions of police brutality, justice, and activism. The 50 Best Podcasts of 2021 Laura Jane Standley and Eric McQuade For years, she has spent her weekdays at a private, majority-white school, where she explains, “I’m cool by default because I’m one of the only black kids there.” Back at home, she lives with her father “Big Mav,” a former gang-member who wants to make their crime-ridden neighborhood a better place, and her mother Lisa, who wants to move away in order to keep her family safe. The incident also means that the carefully built-up boundary between Starr’s two worlds begins to crumble. By the time she’s 16, Starr Carter, the protagonist of the book, has lost two of her childhood friends to gun violence: one by a gang drive-by, and one by a cop.Īs the sole witness to her friend Khalil’s fatal shooting by a police officer, Starr is overwhelmed by the pressure of testifying before a grand jury and the responsibility of speaking out in Khalil’s memory. The last words of Eric Garner, adopted and amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, echo again in the early pages of Angie Thomas’s young-adult novel The Hate U Give.
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