“WebMD calls it a stage of grief—anger. But I doubt I’ll ever get to the other stages. This one slices me into millions of pieces. Every time I’m whole and back to normal, something happens to tear me apart, and I’m forced to start all over again.”

Dates read: November 26-29, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Growing up as a white girl in an overwhelmingly white small town, I was always taught that police were the good guys. The police are there to help you if something bad happens. They are trustworthy. And I continued to, for the most part, believe that through when I graduated from college. Sure, some police were corrupt or abused their power. But there are assholes in every line of work. I don’t think I really started to understand how systemically rotten policing can be, even if individual officers are often good people, until I took criminal law in law school and read about the wide variety of misbehavior they perpetrated from a position of trust. I don’t think all police are bad, or villains, but I think it’s a profession that can be very appealing to exactly the people who shouldn’t be in it: the type who want to have the ability to control the lives of others and enact state-sanctioned violence when that control is questioned.

Starr Turner, the teenage heroine of Angie Thomas’ debut novel The Hate U Give, has a pretty neutral perspective on cops when the book begins: her beloved uncle Carlos is a police officer, and she’s been taught by him and her parents to behave in a threat-neutralizing way if she interacts with them: be polite, follow orders, don’t make sudden movements. And she’s never had any trouble. But then one night, when she’s getting a ride home from a party from her long-time friend Khalil, they’re pulled over on a pretext by a white cop, and he’s shot to death, right there in front of Starr. It changes everything about her life and how she sees the world.

Starr’s already living a fairly unusual life…she lives with her family in the inner city, but goes to a private, overwhelmingly white high school in the suburbs, where she has mostly white friends and dates a white classmate. She’s always found herself living half in each world, but what happens that night really blows up her burgeoning racial consciousness. Her relationships with her friends and family shift and change as she tries to navigate the legal system and get justice for Khalil, and she discovers more and more who she is and who she wants to be.

This book had been hyped for months before I got to it…glowing reviews all over the internet, movie rights sold before it was even published. I always try to temper my expectations with any kind of media that’s been all the rage, but sometimes it doesn’t work. And honestly, I think it contributed towards the way I felt about this book: it’s very good, and I probably would have thought it was amazing if it hadn’t been sold as life-changing and mind-blowing, but it didn’t quite measure up to those enormous accolades for me. There’s a compelling story, solid writing with both emotion and humor, and great characterization. But as a reader, there just was never that moment where it really went into hyperdrive and became more than the sum of its parts.

Like I said, though, it does everything it’s trying to do very well: Starr practically jumps off the page and feels very real, and her family is also beautifully, warmly drawn. Even though Khalil is barely alive during the novel, the way that Starr thinks about him as she processes what happened to him is touchingly rendered and makes the reader really feel his loss. Thomas also does an excellent job of balancing the heavy topic at the center of her book with lightness…there were parts that literally made me laugh out loud, but she never either undercuts the seriousness of police violence or gets too ponderous. But the characters of Starr’s school friends, and especially her boyfriend, seem underdeveloped for the significance that the narrative places on them. And a decision Starr makes near the end of the book seems out of place, in a way that was jarring.

At the end of the day, I’d recommend it to just about everyone, honestly. It’s written as YA (and as a primarily non-YA reader, I’d say it doesn’t read as typical for the genre but does have some markings of it), so it’s appropriate for younger readers, but it didn’t feel dumbed-down to me, someone who loves a gigantic tome of literary fiction. Obviously the focus on police violence will be difficult for some, but it’s a well-crafted, enjoyable book that will likely inspire you to examine your own pre-existing opinions. I highly recommend it!

One year ago, I was reading: Shantaram (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Notes on a Scandal

Three years ago, I was reading: The White Tiger