The Hate U Give
Angie Thomas (2017)
“A sixteen-year-old Black girl witnesses her unarmed childhood friend shot dead by a cop — and the only weapon she has left is her voice.”
At a Glance
Starr Carter, a sixteen-year-old Black girl from Garden Heights, witnesses her childhood friend Khalil shot dead by a police officer during a traffic stop. Pulled between her poor Black neighborhood and her mostly-white prep school, Starr must decide whether to testify before a grand jury about what she saw — knowing that speaking the truth could make her a target. When the officer is not indicted, Starr leads a protest through Garden Heights. The novel takes its title from Tupac Shakur's acronym: THUG LIFE — The Hate U Give Little Infants F***s Everybody.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Hate U Give was the first YA novel to debut at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and hold that position for an extended period while the political events it described were still unfolding. It remained on the list for over two years. It is the first widely-assigned school novel written in African American Vernacular English as its primary narrative register — not translated into standard English for readability but insisting on AAVE as a literary language deserving of the same serious close-reading attention as Fitzgerald's Jazz Age vernacular or Salinger's mid-century New York teenage voice.
Diction Profile
Primarily AAVE-influenced Garden Heights vernacular in narration and dialogue; shifts to measured, suppressed standard American English in Williamson chapters. The switching IS the novel's argument.
Moderate