Keeping the secret from her white boyfriend Chris and her best friends Hailey Grant and Maya Yang – who all attend Williamson Prep – weighs on Starr, as does her need to keep her Williamson and Garden Heights personalities separate. Also helping Starr is her family who offer a variety of points of view, including her Uncle's thoughts as a police officer and her father teaching Starr and her siblings about the Black Panther Party. My phone vibrates again, probably either Chris asking for forgiveness or Kenya asking for backup against Denasia.

In December 2021, it was also removed from some Washington County School District libraries for explicit content. Our house hasn’t lost its Nana-ness though, with its permanent odor of potpourri, flowered wallpaper, and hints of pink in almost every room. He worries particularly for Kenya and Lyric, his half-sisters through Iesha, because of their dangerous home environment with King. The novel also shows Starr's parents' struggles with remaining connected to their community while needing to protect and give opportunity to their children.The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland drew Thomas back to expand the project into a novel, [2] which she titled after Tupac's "THUG LIFE" concept: " The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody.

She and Seven are okay with me dating Chris, although if it was up to Seven I’d become a nun, but whatever. Carlos was a father figure to Starr when her father, Maverick, spent three years in prison for gang activity. Discuss "the talk" -- the conversation that parents of African American and other minority kids have with their children, particularly their sons, about what to do when confronted by the police. Kenya and DeVante attest that Khalil often spoke fondly of Starr, and that he cared about her very much.She is able to show her courage speaking to the grand jury, and realizes that she needs to participate in the protests which follow its decision. It is Thomas's debut novel, expanded from a short story she wrote in college in reaction to the police shooting of Oscar Grant. As Starr finds her own agency, she is able to challenge this narrative first for herself and then for others, recognizing that Khalil was forced into these circumstances by poverty, hunger, and a desire to care for his drug addict mother. Before its publication, exploring a female perspective on the isolation and need to be a model minority at an elite private school was something which had not been conducted in literature or film with the same frequency as for males.

The adults who reach out to mentor and advise the students not only provide guidance but also show vulnerability, which allows the teens in the story to feel comfortable with their own vulnerability. Audiobook producer Caitlin Garing spoke of the importance of matching the material with the narrator and spoke of Turpin's skill, "you can trust her to get to the heart of a story and lead the listener there.

Toward the end of the novel, DeVante reveals that Khalil took great care of his family and only sold drugs to pay off his mother’s debt to King. Shaken by the 2009 police shooting of Oscar Grant, then-college student Angie Thomas began the project as a short story for her senior project in Belhaven University's creative writing program. By maintaining realism, and explicitly naming real-world victims of police brutality, Haddad contends that Thomas is able to spur action in her readers. After Maya confesses that Hailey made racist comments about Maya’s Asian American heritage, Starr and Maya form an alliance to fight Hailey’s racism. Starr was worried about answering the District Attorney’s questions, especially those relating to Khalil’s gun.

Starr is the only witness to the crime and her 16-year-old shoulders have to bear the ferocious outrage of her race and community. And while the number of black characters in children’s books has grown over the past decade, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that the number of books written by black authors has held relatively steady. If I knew following her to this party meant she’d be on some Extreme Makeover: Starr Edition mess, I would’ve stayed home and watched The Fresh Prince reruns.I've taught myself to speak with two different voices and only say certain things around certain people. Seven and Daddy look like one of those age progression pictures they show when somebody’s been missing a long time. Angie Thomas’ 2017 young-adult novel is a profoundly affecting project that takes the themes of Black Lives Matter, police brutality, and black identity and puts them in the limelight. Families can talk about how The Hate U Give discusses the media's reaction to police shootings of unarmed African Americans vs. A teen girl is described as being on birth control, and there's discussion of teen pregnancy and the assumption that a married couple is having sex when they go to their bedroom and turn the television up loud.