This is such an amazing, thought provoking and gut wrenching read. I could identify with Starr is many ways while reading this story. Starr is the key eye witness to the murder of her childhood friend, Khalil and she's put in a tough position. Everyone is so quick to say what they would do in certain situations but when you're point in that situation, it isn't as easy as it seems. She goes through a lot of emotions dealing with the death of her friend and I felt her pain with her. As a person of color I've had several thoughts like Starr. I know what it's like to be judge by the color of my skin. Having to act a certain way so you won't be classified as the "angry black girl". The automatic assumption I live in the ghetto, I don't. This book was such a powerful read and reflected heavily on current situations. I encourage everyone to read this book! White, black, brown, yellow, red, polka dot. Everyone can benefit from reading this powerful read. For a debut book Thomas knocked it out of the park! I loved her writing, the plot and the flow of the story. I felt like I was living it out alongside Starr and her family while reading. I'm looking forward to reading more books by her in the future!

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.

I'm going to start with this--I just finished this book a little less than an hour ago, and I can already say that it has changed my life.Angie Thomas's book about 16-year-old Starr Carter left me speechless and crying for so many reasons, and I'm not sure I can even explain why adequately. Starr herself is written perfectly. She's a high school junior who loves basketball, used to have a massive crush on a Jonas brother, and collects sneakers. She also loves her family, even when they embarrass or frustrate her, is a good student at the private school she attends with almost exclusively rich, white kids (one of whom is her boyfriend), and helps at her dad's community grocery store when she can.However, her life is very different from the ones her friends at school live. Starr is the only black girl in her junior class, lives in a poor black neighborhood that sees more than its fair share of gang violence, is the daughter of an ex-gang member who served time in prison, and saw one of her two best friends killed in a drive-by when she was ten years old.And on the night she is with her other childhood best friend, Khalil, when he is shot in the back by a police officer, despite being unarmed and not doing anything to provoke the officer in any way, she finds herself in the middle of all the fallout from the shooting while still grieving Khalil's death.I'm more than a little ashamed to admit that I'm a privileged white woman in a tiny, primarily white community who has never really even given a ton of thought to the Black Lives Matter movement. I have heard the news, and I felt a piece of the injustice of it all, but prior to reading The Hate U Give, I had never really tried to imagine what the black community really felt. I'm still a privileged white woman in a tiny, primarily white community, which means that I will never really be able to understand what the black community feels, but I'm trying, and I'm trying so much harder than I ever did before.As far as a review, I'm not sure what to say. This is young adult fiction, so I knew it wouldn't be the level of writing to which I'm accustomed. However, Angie Thomas still did an excellent job of creating living, breathing characters and thought-provoking text that made me grab my highlighter many times as I read. The teenagers spoke exactly as teenagers do without coming across as cliché at all, and I usually find that adult young adult writers either try TOO hard to make teenage characters sound like teenagers OR they make them sound entirely too grown up (I'm looking at you in The Fault in Our Stars, John Green. Yeah. I said it.). Thomas, however, nailed it.Meanwhile, The Hate U Give is filled with the kind of profound statements that I never expected from young adult fiction, but they still felt completely natural and appropriate--statements that made me, as an adult, stop and question my own behaviors and thoughts. Statements like the following:"I always said that if I saw it happen to somebody, I would have the loudest voice, making sure the world knew what went down. Now I am that person, and I'm too afraid to speak.""The truth casts a shadow over the kitchen--people like us in situations like this become hashtags, but they rarely get justice.""That's the problem. We let people say stuff, and they say it so much that it becomes okay to them and normal for us. What's the point in having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?"When I finished this book a little while ago, I sobbed like I haven't at the end of a book in a LONG time. I sobbed for Khalil and his community, but more so for the list of real names at the end (that's not a spoiler...promise). There were plenty of moments in the book that made me chuckle a little that helped break up the heaviness of the book (especially when DeVante, Seven, and Starr start making fun of white people, because, let's be honest, everything they said was true), but the weight of the truth this book made me see hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm white. I never have to worry about one of my sons being killed by the police simply for their skin color. And I will never understand that particular reality. Instead, I have been living inside my safe little bubble where I believed that ALL police officers are good and ALL police officers are just trying to do their jobs and racism is really not THAT bad in our country. I never allowed myself to see that SOME police officers are downright racist, and SOME police officers are scared of young, black men simply because they are young, black men, and people of color ARE treated differently, and ANY racism IS that bad.The Hate U Give started changing all that. It enabled me to step into the shoes of a 16-year-old black girl who saw her childhood best friend shot simply because he was young, black, and in a neighborhood with a bad reputation. It also enabled me to see that the lives behind the news headlines are so much more complicated than I am often led to believe, but Angie Thomas never did any of that in a way that placed all the blame on the police. The blame was definitely there, but Starr also acknowledges that there are still a lot of good police officers who don't agree with the actions of their colleagues, and although she helped me to understand the sentiment behind rioting, she also acknowledges that the damage done by rioting is usually to her own community only. And underneath it all, Angie Thomas makes it clear that Starr's community had its own problems from within that were not the fault of the police at all. Instead of placing blame on ANYONE, Angie Thomas is making readers see that there are definitely two sides to every story, and for most of us, we have only REALLY heard one of them.

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.

This is the story of 16-year-old Starr, a girl who witnesses her life-long friend get killed by a police officer while unarmed. She balances between two worlds while the murder makes national news: the one where she lives surrounded by non-traditional families and neighbors who’ve seen it all and gangbangers and business owners in a black community filled with people whose choices are never easy, and the one where she goes to a mostly-white private school at which she becomes a completely different version of herself so nobody knows about her home world. But it’s so much more than that. And that’s why I am going to ask people who can’t relate to this story—particularly white people—to read it as soon as they possibly can.The reason I believe reading books by people who aren’t your and your experience’s doppelgänger is important is because it allows us to pluck at the threads of truth about other peoples’ lives, experiences, secrets at our own pace and in our own heads as we go along (note: I am white). We get to know them, see them, emotionally connect with them. Read enough of these stories, and we become able to see the real people in our world who are represented by those characters. We become more empathetic to and more understanding of their situations, even when they are so vastly different from our own that our knee-jerk reactions to their real-life words/actions/decisions tend to be denial, rejection. A disbelief because it doesn’t seem right or doesn’t feel comfortable.Reading these stories connects us in a way our world needs right now, and THUG is the book we should all be reading.