Fall 2021: Wild Readers Group 5 discussion

The book I chose for my fourth Good Reads Review is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. The book is about a young girl named Starr who has to navigate her new reality and her emotions after she becomes the sole witness of the death of her best friend at the hands of a police officer. I did not expect to enjoy this book. Personally, before I read the book, I thought it was going to be a preachy but necessary book I needed to read in order to gain newfound insight towards my own race, I’m Black By the way. After taking the time to finally read this book, I realized that that was not the case. This book is more the exploration of how a teen might feel seeing an event of police violence first hand. To add more depth to the story, Starr is shown to have a stake in all angles of this incident. The person who was killed was her estranged best friend, her Uncle happens to be a cop, her father is an ex-convict, she grew up in the ghetto, but attends a school in a richer and mostly white neighborhood, and she has white boyfriend. This Story is very much written from the perspective of a highschooler and as an adult I can pretty often predict what Starr might do next, but this story was written for kids in or near high school age and I do not think they would be able to predict it so easily. I really think young readers would really identify with Starr and her emotional journey throughout the story.