I started reading The Hate U Give last year, but the first 50 pages are a bit slow and I didn't feel myself into the story, so I procrastinated its reading. I took it again on February 5th and I read it in two days. I needed a book which could take me out of a big reading slump and so it did. I have to thank Ana (@oceans_of_books) for reminding me I had this book on my TBR and telling me it was really good to get off of a reading slump.
I grabbed it again thinking “if I don’t like it this time I’m going to DNF it” but luckily I liked ─ no, loved ─ it. I read it so fast that I almost hadn’t time to take notes for its review, plus as I felt with The Girls by Emma Cline I think I’m not the right person to write a review of THUG that does justice to it, because it’s a really good book, and someone who only likes to read and maybe write reviews of what she reads is not the most appropriate person to judge a book like this. So it will be more a personal opinion about the topic that is spoken throughout the whole book than a review itself.
Nothing to say about Angie Thomas' obsession for Harry Potter and 2Pac.
Starr, 16 years old, is a character that changes a lot along the story, but you don’t notice it because she doesn’t either, until you think that she would have never done all the things she does if she hadn't lived what she’s been through. She grows up way too young because of her best friends’ deaths, first Natasha and Khalil’s the second, she has seen both of them live. Starr has always lived in two parallel worlds, being and acting differently in each of them, her turbulent neighbourhood, Garden Heights, and the well-being school, Williamson. Starr is afraid of what happened to Khalil, to talk about him or about what happened that night, how Agent One-Fifteen killed him, and to face her friends from school because they may judge her for being Khalil’s friend; but she ends up rising her chin and facing the world and its cruelty, telling the truth ─ shouting the truth.
“I can't change where I come from or what I've been through, so why should I be ashamed of what makes me, me? That's like being ashamed of myself.” ― Starr Amara Carter.
One of the scenes that broke my heart was the one where Starr talks about the march on Garden Heights for Khalil. There she sees a child holding a placard that says “Am I next?”.
The whole book is real and deep, with sense and morality, but this part touched my soul so hard. No one deserves to be killed, either if it’s an old person or a child, a white or a black person, a man or a woman. No. One. And not only black people have to fight for the equality, like not only women have to do it for their rights. We all live in the same world and we are all liable of what happens in it.
What’s told in The Hate U Give could be perfectly real, and of course something like that has happened too many times before. Do not let this happen. World could be a peaceful place to live in but cruelty and fear has transformed it into a rough place.
The only thing I'm sure about The Hate U Give is that it should be a must-read in all schools around the globe.
The Hate U Give is... wow.
Genre: contemporary, young-adult.
