REVIEW: THE HATE U GIVE by Angie Thomas

THE HATE U GIVE by Angie Thomas

RATING: ★★★★★

GENRE: Young adult, bordering on new adult.

THEMES: The Black Lives Matter movement, race, identity, coming of age, activism, poverty, and police brutality.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Police brutality, gun violence, gang violence, mentions of domestic violence, mentions of drug use.

Once upon a time there was a hazel-eyed boy with dimples. I called him Khalil. The world called him a thug.

THE HATE U GIVE, or, as it’s affectionately abbreviated by fans, THUG, centers around Starr Carter, a sixteen year old black girl living in Garden Heights, an impoverished, mostly-black neighborhood, but who attends the nearly all-white high school, Williamson Prep. Identity and perception rule Starr’s world, and while most teens can relate to this, as a teen of color, Starr is living in two worlds, constantly trying to manage how to balance between “Garden Heights Starr” and “Williamson Starr”: Garden Heights Starr can speak the way she wants to without feeling like she’ll be seen as improper or “ghetto”, while Williamson Starr has to hold her tongue; Garden Heights Starr can be angry and emotional and complicated, while Williamson Starr can’t be without being perceived as “the angry black girl”; Garden Heights Starr is only known as Big Mao’s daughter who works at the store, while Williamson Starr is a basketball star, a good dancer, a cool girl–but also as one of the only black girls in school.

Williamson Starr doesn’t use slang – if a rapper would say it, she doesn’t say it, even if her white friends do. Slang makes them cool. Slang makes her “hood”. Williamson Starr holds her tongue when people piss her off so nobody will think she’s the “angry black girl”. Williamson Starr is approachable. No stank-eyes, none of that. Williamson Starr is no confrontational. Basically, Williamson Starr doesn’t give anyone a reason to call her ghetto.

While juggling these two identities and trying to navigate some normal teenage dilemmas–friendships that wane, romantic relationships that are starting to get physical–Starr hides a deeply-buried trauma that she is reminded of every day: the death of one of her best friends, Natasha, at the hands of a drive-by, assumedly gang related shooting.

One night, Starr is invited to a party in Garden Heights, where she and another of her best friends, Khalil, catch up. In another room, gunshots fire off, and the party ends abruptly, teens running out of the house. Khalil and Starr, running out together, decide to carpool home.

Then Khalil is pulled over by the police.

Then Khalil, like so many black boys in the USA, is assumed to be a threat.

Then Khalil is shot and killed in the middle of the street.

Days later, the process begins for a trial against the officer. And Starr has a choice: to speak out against the injustice or to stay silent.

I’ve seen it over and over again; a black person gets killed just for being black, and all hell breaks loose. I’ve tweeted RIP hashtags, reblogged pictures on Tumblr, and signed very petition out there. 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.

It has been a while since I last read a YA novel. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I can actually recall the last YA novel I read.

I have nothing against YA or new adult in the slightest–I just often find myself wanting to read more adult themes and characters. But one night, on a spontaneous date-night trip to the closest Barnes and Noble (my boyfriend lovingly enables supports my bookworminess), the beautiful, shining, gilded-covered collectors’ edition version of THE HATE U GIVE, a novel that has been sitting on my TBR since its release in 2017, I had to get it and start reading it.

At first, THUG looks like a behemoth of a book. At just under 450 pages, I think this is one of the longer YA books I’ve come across, and I was wondering–not really nervous, though–how Angie Thomas would be able to keep the story engaging for such a large span of text.

This was one of the quicker books I’ve read, and I attribute that to both Angie Thomas’ style of writing, which has a really distinct voice and so easily speaks the way teenagers do, and the gripping story. There wasn’t a single point in THUG where I felt that there was a lull or a slow period, and it kept me engaged and hungry for more.

I have horrible, horrible motion sickness, and I read this book for 4 hours on a round trip bus ride. That should speak for itself.

Thomas weaves together the incredibly dark, heavy traumas that shape Starr’s life and her family’s–their struggles in Garden Heights as people who want to help change their neighbors and influence them to better themselves, the danger they face in a neighborhood rife with gang violence and a tight police grip, and Starr’s witnessing of two of her best friends being brutally shot in front of her before she graduates high school–and some pretty average, everyday struggles and triumphs of coming of age. There is a beautiful balance of bright humor and supporting friendships, budding activism and bravery, pain and its catharsis.

THUG is the kind of book that I think every single white person should read. Will it make everyone comfortable? No. Will it shed light on Black Lives Matter, whiteness, and police brutality? Absolutely.

Sometimes we need to read something that will make us uncomfortable. Sometimes we need a reminder that this world is not perfect for all of its people. All of its children.

THUG is that necessary reminder, that brave little voice, that rallying cry that now, more than ever, we need to support people of color and assert their validity, their right to this earth, the importance of their lives.

REVIEW: THE FEVER by Megan Abbott

THE FEVER by Megan Abbott

RATING: ★★★★☆

SIMILAR READS: Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman.

GENRE: New adult horror/thriller.

I have had an interest in witches for a very long time–specifically, with the Salem witch trials. In fifth grade, my class held a history fair where we could pick any historical topic we wanted, research it, and make a huge, three-part poster about it. I picked the Salem witch trials and made an aptly creepy poster: painted black, with red paper and printouts of 17th-century illustrations of the hysteric courthouse and its flailing girls, pointing their fingers at their next accused witch.

In college, to my excitement, we studied Salem as a phenomenon, looking into the various theories that have been made about why these girls, in this specific environment, acted the way they did. Was it a mass-spread anxiety borne by a community that faced massive amounts of death each winter due to the harsh conditions? Or a demand for a marginalized group in society–young girls, who virtually had no autonomy–to claim a sort of power? Or a game gone too far?

There have been multiple similar incidences since Salem of communities suddenly falling into an unexplained, shared hysteria, one, in 2012, affecting 18 teenaged girls in a Le Roy, New York high school, who all simultaneously fell ill with unexplained seizures.  Parents clamored for answers: what was the school hiding? What was making their daughters sick? Was it hazardous waste?

I’m not sure if Megan Abbott has revealed if this incident in Le Roy served as inspiration for THE FEVER, but it certainly feels like it was. And, unsurprisingly, I absolutely loved it.

Deenie, Lise, and Gabby are best friends attending Dryden high school and experiencing the awkwardness of the coming-of-age years: beginning to experiment with sex, or at least entertaining the idea of doing so; navigating the sometimes brutal social climate of high school friendships; and struggling with the concept that they are slowly being seen more as “young women” and less as children.

On a seemingly normal morning, Deenie and Lise are sitting in class when, suddenly, Lise collapses to the floor, seizing in the middle of class.

Lise is taken to the hospital, and the rumor mill begins: she’s pregnant, she’s on drugs…

Did she go to the lake? One student posits.

The Dryden lake is a green, thick mass of algae and god-knows-what-else. Local legend has it that a boy died in the lake and anyone who comes in contact with it gets sick. Deenie, Lise, Gabby, and other girls at the high school have been to the lake–recently. But Deenie brushes aside any of the rumored causes: if it was caused by the lake, wouldn’t the other girls be getting sick, too?

And that’s when it begins: Gabby faints during a band concert. A slew of high school girls are suddenly dropping like flies in the middle of class, seizing, vomiting, twitching, experiencing hallucinations. Deenie is one of the few girls not affected.

Parents in Dryden are rushing to conclusions. In an anti-vax uprising, some blame the recent outcropping of HPV vaccines. Some blame the school for somehow not complying with hygiene and other contamination standards. As the town begins to fold in on itself, Deenie, her father, Tom, and her brother, Eli try to find out the true cause while trying to assemble some sense of normalcy, but soon, the hysteria becomes too much to handle.

I can safely say that I’m a Megan Abbott fan now. I really enjoyed the narrative being split between Deenie, Eli, and Tom–each character has their own struggles with their own darkness, their own coming-of-age-related anxieties, and their own ideas about what’s happening in Dryden. Abbott does an incredible job of slowly building a very scary narrative that only truly begins to unravel in the last few chapters, and I can safely say that I actually did not expect the actual cause of the sickness.

THE FEVER is a pretty perfect October read if you are looking for a Salem-esque feeling. An essence of hysteria is deep in the bones of this book, making it an incredibly thrilling read.