The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas: A Full Summary and Guide
What it is about
The Hate U Give is Angie Thomas's debut novel, published on 28 February 2017 by Balzer + Bray, a HarperCollins imprint that won a bidding war for the rights. It grew out of a short story Thomas wrote at college in reaction to the police shooting of Oscar Grant.
The narrator is Starr Carter, a sixteen-year-old African-American girl who lives in Garden Heights, a fictional, mostly poor and mostly black neighbourhood. She attends Williamson Prep, an affluent and largely white private school in another part of the city. Starr runs two versions of herself, one for each place, and the effort of keeping them apart shapes everything she says and does.
The story begins at a party in Garden Heights. A shooting breaks it up, and Starr leaves with her childhood best friend and sometime crush, Khalil. A white police officer pulls them over. Starr never learns his name and calls him Officer One-Fifteen, after his badge number. He orders Khalil out of the car. Khalil leans back in through the driver-side window to check on Starr, and the officer, assuming he is reaching for a gun, shoots him three times and kills him.
From there the novel follows what happens to a witness. Khalil's death becomes a national news story. The media casts him as a gang banger and a drug dealer while treating One-Fifteen more kindly. Starr's identity as the witness is kept secret at first, even from her younger brother Sekani. She has to decide how much to say, to whom, and at what cost.
The main characters
Starr carries the book. Her double life is the engine of the plot, and her slow move from silence to public speech is its shape. She gives a police interview, then a television interview, then speaks out at the protests themselves.
Maverick, her father, served three years in prison for gang activity. He was only allowed to leave the King Lords because he confessed to a crime to protect the gang's leader, King. Now he owns the Garden Heights grocery store where Starr and her older half-brother Seven work. Uncle Carlos, a detective, was a father figure to Starr while Maverick was inside, and it is Carlos who encourages her to speak to the police.
King is the feared presence in the neighbourhood. He lives with Seven's mother, Seven's half-sister Kenya (a friend of Starr's) and Kenya's little sister Lyric. DeVante is a teenager Maverick helps get out of the King Lords.
At Williamson, Starr has a white boyfriend, Chris, and two best friends, Hailey Grant and Maya Yang. Hailey makes racist comments. Chris struggles to understand what Starr is going through. These friendships are tested hard, and the novel does not resolve them all the same way.
The themes
Identity is the first. Thomas wrote the book partly to show readers what code switching costs the black Americans who do it. Starr speaks, dresses and jokes differently depending on which world she is standing in, and the strain increases when her mother takes a better-paid job and the family moves out of Garden Heights.
Justice is the second. The novel is interested in the gap between what Starr saw and what the system does with it. A grand jury decides the question, and the neighbourhood's response, both peaceful protest and riot, follows from that decision.
Class runs underneath both. Williamson money and Garden Heights money are not the same money. Starr's family can leave the neighbourhood; most of their neighbours cannot. Thomas wrote the book to widen readers' understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the class detail is part of that picture.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the ending fresh. The grand jury fails to indict One-Fifteen. Garden Heights erupts. During the riot, Starr, Chris, Seven and DeVante defend Maverick's store against King, though it burns down anyway. The neighbourhood finally stands up to King, and DeVante's testimony leads to his arrest and an expected long sentence. Starr and Maya begin calling out Hailey's comments, and Chris offers Starr support. Starr promises to keep Khalil's memory alive and to keep speaking out as Garden Heights rebuilds.
Why it still matters
The book debuted at number one on The New York Times young adult bestseller list and stayed there for fifty weeks. It won several awards and was praised for its writing and its timing. The audiobook, narrated by Bahni Turpin, won awards of its own. A 20th Century Fox film adaptation followed in October 2018 to positive reviews.
It has also been fought over. The subject matter and the language made it one of the most challenged books in American libraries in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021, according to the American Library Association. That record is part of the reason it keeps being read. The novel suits readers aged roughly fourteen and up, anyone teaching contemporary American fiction, and adults who want the story of a police shooting told from inside the car.
