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

Angie Thomas has written an amazingly provocative debut novel. It ranks with Victoria Christopher Murray's Stand Your Ground and Jody Piccoult's, Small Great Things. The novel has believable characters, realistic dialogue, and a slice of life.Starr Carter lives in Garden Heights, where gunshots, drug dealers, and gangbangers are a part of her life. In an effort to protect her and her brothers, Seven and Sekani, and for a better education, their parents send them to Williamson, a private school. Starr has learned to negotiate both worlds, but with different personae. At Williamson, Starr doesn't want to be "ghetto" or "the angry black girl". At home she hangs around the house or works at her father's neighborhood grocery store.The last weekend of Spring Break, her friend Kenya talks Starr into gAsoig to a party. While at the party, Starr runs into an old friend, Khapulls hey are catching up and reminiscing, a fight erupts. Khalil gets Starr out of house and into his car. On the wag to Star's house, they talk and listen to some Tupac. Khalil explains to Starr why Tupac is still relevant. Then the blue lights flash behind them and Khalil pulls over. What happens next terrifies Starr, changes Starr in so many ways.

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.

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

Rating: 3.5/5.0First, let me say that when a book is highly rated and very much hyped I tend to pass it under my own microscope! This might sound unfair because I don't do the same with other books that are averagely rated, but again I don't do that with them because I get into them with no expectations. The Hate U Give is one of those books that became so popular and so much talked about and very highly rated. So have I jumped on the hype train as well?Hmm, I have to say the book is good, it discusses some very important issues that might not have been tackled before in the YA genre (This is what I think caused the hype) but this definitely not the only book that talks about such issues if you look into the adult books too.What I liked about this book is the format. Where there is more dialogue going on between the different characters. The only person we get to know more about is the protagonist Starr as the whole story is told from her perspective so we get to know what goes on inside her head and what actions she is going to take. The book addresses several problems we have in different societies like racism, brutality by police, dealing with drugs and also gang wars. Not all of these were much elaborated though. Some dialogues I really liked too and think they were well written but I would not say all of it!Things I did not like: I feel there were many big opportunities that were missed here and there. The book does not have much tension as I expected a serious subject like that needed. Yes, there is some tension in certain scenes but where I expected the book to shine it failed. For example, the questions and answers in the police station that ended very fast, then the TV interview was such a big disappointment it was about two pages only from the whole book. Starr being questioned in front of the Grand Jury was almost non-existent, that was just a page and half! In These three situations, the author could've made the best parts of the book but she decided to completely ignore them and give bigger scenes to situations that were not important. I feel the priorities for the author was to cater the book more to the young audiences by making the subject somehow lighter than what it is.Another thing I did not like was certain aspects of the main character. I rolled my eyes and cringed when she kept making references to Taylor Swift or Beyonce. I also feel the main character was over critical about certain things. Although she was dealing with racism issue she has fallen into the same trap herself when she rejected to be honest with her white boyfriend and when she was asked about it she said: "because you are white, white, white"!! But is it not a racist thing to label a whole race with something just because one person did that?As I said the book is good and tackles important issues but I don't feel it is an extraordinary one as many reviews and ratings made me feel. I don't feel this book has gone deep enough in dealing with these subjects as I expected it would. I would have to go with a good 3.5 stars out of 5 stars here.