The Hate U Give



‘The rules no fucking longer apply’ Starr Carter

The other week when I went to watch the BlacKkKlansman the trailer for the up and coming film adaption of the novel ‘The Hate U Give’ was played and it got me riled up and intrigued. I’ve seen the book advertised in my local library for a while but hadn’t picked it up till now mainly because it is categorised as a teen book and I felted I’ve out grown the genre, but I was very wrong.

The novel tells the story of a teenage girl named Starr Carter who witnesses the murder of her best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer and how she and the people in her lives react to the situation.

From the first page I fell in love with this book. The way it is written sounds very much like the thoughts in my head which makes it so easy to read, so much so that I finished the book in only four days.


Angie Thomas merges potentially the two things that mean the most to me and to herself according to her interview with  The Daily Telegraph which are music and stories. This is evident from the title alone as it is the first half of the late rapper Tupac’s acronym for THUG LIFE which stands for ‘The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone’, which is something that I think I’ll remember forever now, although when I first read it I felt it didn’t make sense but as I grew with the protagonist Starr Carter the meaning of those words become so much clearer.

I sympathised with Starr throughout the novel as she constantly tried to get stronger but couldn’t manage for too long without violently crying. The way that Starr and many other characters react to the events in the novel causes me not to see the themes in the novel as not just a plain divide between black and white nor police and civilian but instead raises the question of whether or not people speak out if they need to, since Starr herself was ‘too afraid to speak’, amongst many other important messages.

Ultimately, Thomas’ first novel is practically faultless as it somehow successfully merges the inner thoughts of a teenage girl and the complexities of the current situation in America which have allowed the novel to win four awards this year including the Waterstones Children Book Prize and Coretta Scott King Award. I’m very excited now for the release of her next work ‘On The Come Up’ and anxious to see the film adaption to make sure they don’t ‘fuck everyone.’



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