I wanted to tweet @ you, Angie, but I couldn't limit my characters enough! I followed you bc of an automated Twitter recommendation, and when I started seeing all the buzz about The Hate U Give, I finally had to see what the big deal was all about. I was sucked in on the first page. Not only are you an incredible story teller, but you got your message across clearly without ever being pushy or preachy. I loved your characters, the depth each one had, the unique perspective everyone offered and all the angles you approached the situation from.I'm a white girl who grew up in a predominately white midwestern suburb, and I feel like you offered me and others like me an opportunity to peek inside another world and build a better sense of empathy and understanding of this national problem. You handled an extremely controversial subject with grace, wisdom, and integrity and I honestly feel like everyone who reads this should finally "get it."Thank you- Haddi

Wow, what a great book! This book is so timely in the wake of all the shootings of young black men and the inability of law enforcement to train their personnel to respond differently when making routine stops and for the anger members in the community feel when charges are not brought up against the officers.This is also a coming of age book about the protagonist in the story: Starr, a 16 year old African American girl who is trying to straddle two worlds: the working class, tight knit, all black neighborhood where literally "everybody knows your name" and the upper middle class, predominantly white high school her parents send her and her two brothers to.Boy, did this book ring a bell, park itself in my psyche and stayed awhile to visit! I could relate to all of the characters: in some ways Starr's family is my family: as black parents how do we insure our kids have a good education and yet keep them in touch with their cultural heritage, and why, as black parents do we have to make these kind of choices? I too have made the speech to our kids about what to do if you're stopped by the police, we too are tired and frustrated with the needless deaths of young African American men.The story very realistically depicts how Starr struggles with the death of her close friend Khalil, what it means to her and her community that she is the only eye witness. The author fully captures what DuBois called the double consciousness that many blacks still have to live in America. She has Starr deal with micro aggression from friends, navigating having a white boyfriend, internalized negative stereotypes about blacks, are you betraying your family and/or your community when you move out of the "hood"? and then the everyday, "regular" messiness of family life.Great fantastic debut novel with awesome characters, lots and lots of depths and nuances of the complexity of what it means to grow up black in 21st century America. I look forward to reading books by this author in the future.

I haven't had the opportunity but forever I have been wanting to talk about The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. I read this book in March and it etched it's way into my core scratch by scratch.This book was more than a now book. It was a now-and-always book to me. It seemed to reach back in the past to the days of Good Burger and Hey Arnold to the days where black people win at everything and the culture is constantly appropriated to the uncertain days ahead of us. This book seemed to preach the words and the thoughts and feelings of black people and women everywhere to me. I know that I cannot know if that is true because I cannot know all the experiences that black people everywhere have but something about Angie's writing was like a resounding voice. An echo into a cavern and it was like...there was a light answering back. This is a book that I wished I had before my official teenage years, even. This is a book that is THE book to point at when explaining what you mean when you say that those outside the black experience cannot write as authentically as those within. There is something that was so nuanced, so deeply bound within this book that I personally feel either cannot or is hard to be found in a book with a black MC written by a white individual. There is a soul within, a spirit within it that is so natural that I feel that even decades writing no other individual would be able to style it in a way that is similar enough to be satisfactory. This book was the torch held in the sky by Lady Liberty. So high that it would be difficult, almost impossible for any other light to reach or ever match that torch. That is how I felt and feel at this time.The Hate U Give is a beating heart with so much blood and love and realness inside of it that when you feel it inside of you, it is almost as if you might burst with the joy and the heartache that is this book. I loved how the characters were so fully developed. It was almost as if they were breathing and it pulled me out of wherever I was, fully into the book. I love how the writing is so honest. There were some lines that as soon as I read them, they seemed to bury themselves in my insides. This is a book that if I had the time, I would probably read over and over again.I love the humanity within this book and the rising awareness of complex characters within YA and sometimes morally ambiguous ones, too, because I feel though the majority of us (or so I would like to believe) strive to be good and honest people...The Hate U Give identifies the moral ambiguity within people. Within black people, without degrading the characters or making them out to be less than because of their flaws. The moral ambiguity makes the characters so vulnerable, there they are raw and ripped open for your love. Thank you, Angie Thomas, for writing The Hate U Give

The author is from my city. She a native, me a transplant from another part of the state. We have friends in the same writer circles thought we haven't officially met each other. I say this not to to boast but to bring home that this story felt REAL to me because of that.But beyond geography, Thomas gets that black experience where you have to straddle multiple worlds. Not black enough and not enough of a model minority. Interracial dating. Racist white friends who insist they aren't racist. Having to cut those people loose. Dishonest and abusive law enforcement. How it feels to grow up in a less than safe area. Just regular culture in America. This town could be anywhere.Starr is a very authentic character with an authentic voice. The situation she is in can and has happened everywhere in the United States and in other countries. This story was hard for me to read at first because it was real. It isn't a fantasy. The ending is hopeful but not clean. It makes you think.While the book is about a serious and prevalent topic, it also has funny moments. I laughed hard at some parts. The Harry Potter gang theory, the catfish scene, just random dialogue.I'm glad I read this book. We need more black voices and other voices outside of the white lens. Stories written for us by us.Great job, Angie and I hope the movie captures this story well. Maybe one day the narrative in this unfair and unjust racist world will change.

Through a tightrope balancing act, Starr Carter has managed to keep her two worlds apart: there’s Garden Heights, the neighborhood she’s grown up in that she won’t let anyone but herself call “ghetto,” and then there’s Williamson, the predominantly white prep school she attends. In Garden Heights, she’s freer with using slang and showing attitude; at Williamson Prep, she carefully measures her slang and limits her attitude so she doesn’t come across as a “sassy black girl.” But when a white police officer shoots and kills Starr’s childhood friend Khalil right in front of her, Starr finds the two worlds she’s worked so hard to keep apart suddenly colliding beyond her control. Khalil’s death becomes national news, tension rises between rival gangs in Garden Heights, Starr’s parents argue about whether to stay in Garden Heights or move their family to a safer neighborhood, the police want Starr to give a statement about what happened to Khalil, and Starr has to face many uncomfortable questions. Is it true that Khalil was dealing drugs, and did he really join a gang? Is it a betrayal to all the black men in her life that Starr has a white boyfriend? Can she really trust any of her Williamson friends? How can she be proud of where she comes from when so many tragic things have happened there to people she loves? And most important of all, will Starr have the courage to make her voice heard when it matters most?I don’t need to point out that many of the issues Starr faces in this book have been front and center in recent media and online discussions: systemic racism, police brutality and racial profiling against black men, lack of affordable housing and job opportunities for people of color, the cycle of poverty and limited economic opportunity that pressures many black men into gangs and drug dealing, code switching between racial cultures, the challenges of interracial relationships, and the damage that racial slurs can do. But just as a picture is worth a thousand words, a compellingly written novel is worth a thousand blog posts. In The Hate U Give, author Angie Thomas paints a powerful picture of what it’s actually like to see your best friend killed by a police officer and the tremendous courage it takes to live with that. Besides tragedy, though, there’s also a lot of heart and even some humor sprinkled throughout Starr’s story. Starr is so much more than what happens to her, and her journey to prove this is a deeply moving read.