Book Club: Reading/Review The Hate U Give

[midnightcatprowl]

This is the reading/review thread for:

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Please note that this time I've gone back to combining the reading and review threads so be aware that posts may contain spoilers. Is it better to have the reading and review threads separate or combined? What do you think?

[carrie80]

Further to the discussion on The Shock of the Fall thread, I'm also happy with combined threads. I agree with MM that indicating where you are in the book is a good compromise, so people can decide whether to go ahead and read a post.

I'm at chapter 12, almost half way through.

I knew that the book engaged with the Black Lives Matter movement and I must have read the back cover blurb at some point, but I had forgotten and was shocked by the end of the second chapter. I think that was a pretty good way to come at it, so if you haven't read the blurb yet, maybe don't?

I'm liking this book a lot so far. It's very readable and Starr and her community are likable and well drawn. I have a slight knot of anxiety in my stomach while reading it, which seems appropriate. I might have more to say later, but for the moment I'm still processing.

[carrie80]

I've finished The Hate U Give.

I really enjoyed this book. It's easy to read and the voice is engaging. There's not a huge amount of plot, it's more of a character and community study. I really liked Starr and her family and she felt like a realistic teenager. Thomas is strong on sketching characters - everyone we saw even briefly felt three dimensional.

The slang and language Starr and the Garden Heights community use felt realistic, was easy to understand, and wasn't at all clunky or cringey, as local dialect in novels can be. The one word that did throw me out of the story a little was gangbanger, which seems to mean gang member. I liked that Starr uses different language depending on which community she is in.

It's obviously a book written with an agenda and reading it inevitably made me think of the black people killed by the police in the US over the last few years - perhaps fittingly, I started reading this the day after the police officer who shot Philandro Castile was acquitted of all charges. However, it never felt preachy and it doesn't in any way feel that the story is lacking or twisted to make a point. It's more that through the story, Thomas gives us an entry to a poor black neighbourhood, shows us some of the difficulties, the things to love about the community and the reasons for anger and humanises the residents.

I think this is a book I'll be thinking about for a while, and I may come back later with more comments. I'm curious to see how other Bookclub members find it.

[MistyMeena]

Only picked this book up from the library yesterday - hadn't realised that the title has the acronym THUG until I saw it on the spine. I'm about 40 pages in so haven't read Carrie's comments yet.

I've found the characters so far to be very agreeable but I am taking a while to get into the flow of the book. It is probably due to my age that the speech patterns and cultural references are slowing me down! I can't fault it for getting straight into the action and hooking me to know more though.

[midnightcatprowl]

Bought this for my Kindle from Amazon (so I thought) and was getting on well with it. Then just as Starr and her mother leave the police station I get a message saying I can continue to read if I actually buy the book. Sigh! It seems I clicked on a 'sample' version though not what I intended and also for a sample it seemed pretty long but there you go. Then tried to buy the whole book from my Kindle, now I buy books from the Kindle all the time but on this occasion got a message that I couldn't buy from a 'mobile' device but needed to do so from a computer (presumably desktop/laptop). Fine except I was in bed at the time and I always turn my desktop off before going to bed! What happens to people who only have 'mobile' devices and not desktops/laptops? Anyway yesterday I bought the full version via my desktop so can get going again.

So far? Well I'm particularly 'engaged' as it were by Starr's having to operate in the two very different environments of her home and her home area and the school (largely white and more middle class) where her parents (or actually her mother?) have decided to send her and the stresses and compromises which this necessarily creates for her.

[MistyMeena]

Finished

I feel very neutral about this book. I didn’t feel that I learnt anything from it. There was a sad inevitability to the action. I applaud it for not becoming overly dramatic though.

[midnightcatprowl]

Finally finished. My feelings about this book are complicated. As someone else has said the book has no real plot as such rather it is happenings over a period of time, you dive into the situation and in due course you are politely but firmly removed from further participation as a reader not because it is 'the end' but because this is the point at which the author decides to cease involving you.

At times I felt very engaged by this book. At times I wanted to avoid reading further for fear of what might happen. At times I was shocked by what happened even though I know perfectly well from the news and from friends in the US that these things are not only happening but have become 'normalised' for want of a better word and I'm both sad and horrified to say that they seem to be becoming normalised in the UK too. At times I was trying to take an interest in things in which I've little or no interest e.g. Starr is both a keen basketball player and a keen watcher along with her family of basketball, while I regard it - and to be fair almost all sport - as a complete bore, so reading through details of an informal game was a bit of a trial and also quite puzzling as this was the one bit in the book where I couldn't follow or at least work out the language and terminology used!

I liked Starr and felt engaged by her as a character, yet, by the end of the book, I wasn't sure that she'd fully come alive as an individual, some aspects of her seemed to be missing, for example she's sixteen on the verge of adulthood, yet there is almost nothing about her personal aspirations for the future. At the same time you can't define her as a girl without aspiration (or believing that whatever she aspires will be impossible) because of her background and circumstances as her father is a business owner despite his difficulties in the past and he seeks to help another young man from going down the slippery slope which once took him to jail, her mother is an achiever in employment terms and the family as a result has the control and choice over various issues such as schooling and whether they stay in a challenging area or move - the decisions may not be easy but as a family they are in control of their lives and not just tossed around by circumstance. So I felt I was missing something I wanted to know about Starr and I kept expecting it would come up but it didn't.

On the one hand I sometimes felt that too many issues were being addressed at the same time. For example issues of racism which are the theme of the book are mixed with issues to do with education and what in the UK we would call 'class', it is not called 'class' in the US in the same way but it is there and in just as an intense way. Starr has to live/survive/thrive in two very different environments because of the decisions made by her mother and it is not just about race (because the school she attends is mainly 'white') but also about what we would call class/background, many people like me who moved from one class to another as it were via educational success will be aware of the issues and challenges of having particularly during secondary education a foot in either camp as it were. There are also simply growing up issues and the way that young people - no matter how loving and caring their family and Starr's certainly is - have to start to break free e.g. if the 'right' boyfriend is the 'white' boyfriend then a young person with any guts (and Starr certainly has them as does Chris) will stick with that decision. But I realised it wasn't right to make the criticism that too many issues were being addressed when I was feeling the lack of knowing more about certain issues for example Starr's mother is presented as a competent, powerful and yet tolerant woman in her own family but also as a successful woman in her work life. I wanted to know more about her and how she got to be the person/wife/mother/worker she was but, as with Starr, there is something missing. Maybe we have to wait for the next book?

As someone else has said I didn't actually learn as much from this book as I expected and I'd add that I wasn't actually as challenged by it as I expected if only because I've already met the challenge/been made aware of the issues in other contexts and this book didn't actually add much new to that. I'd expect that people from a different background and with a different range of current contacts would be more startled and newly shocked.

On the whole I found the book uneven and in many ways disappointingly not shocking enough! On the other hand I'm sort of wishing for a sequel with more emphasis on Starr's future and on her mother's past and future.