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.”
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The Hate U Give
Angie Thomas (2017) · 444pages · Contemporary · 2 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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 ...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: 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.
Narrator: Starr Carter: first-person, present-tense urgency in a past-tense narrative. She is telling this story from a positio...
Figurative Language: Moderate
Historical Context
2010s America — Black Lives Matter movement, era of filmed police killings: The Hate U Give is impossible to read as anything other than a direct response to the specific historical moment of its writing. The pattern it depicts — Black man shot during routine encounter, of...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Starr maintains two different versions of herself — Garden Heights Starr and Williamson Starr. Is this code-switching a strength, a survival strategy, or a form of self-betrayal? Can it be all three at once?
- Maverick explains Tupac's THUG LIFE acronym to Starr. How does this framework explain Khalil's decision to sell drugs? Does it excuse him, explain him, or do neither?
- Starr names the officer who killed Khalil only as 'One-Fifteen' — his badge number — for most of the novel. Why? What does refusing to use his name do to the reader's relationship to the shooting?
- Hailey says she's not racist. Is she? How does Thomas use Hailey to show that racism doesn't require conscious malice to cause harm?
- The novel ends without legal justice — the officer is not indicted. Does Starr win? What does winning look like in a system designed the way this one is?
Notable Quotes
“Williamson Prep has given me a lot of things. It hasn't given me the talk.”
“I've seen it happen over and over again: a Black person gets killed just for being Black, and all hell breaks loose.”
“I don't want him to think I'm one of those Black people who automatically assumes the worst about cops.”
Why Read This
Because it was written in your language, about your world, and it does not ask you to translate yourself to understand it. Because the question it asks — whose voice matters, and what does it cost to use yours — is not a fictional question. Becaus...