The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

I felt like I lived between the pages of The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas the entire time I read it. The story infiltrated my imagination and stayed with me even when I wasn't reading and after I finished it. Even now, weeks later, the characters still resonate with me. I felt Starr Carter's pain as she watched her friend, Khalil, die and as she tried to navigate her life while trying to keep her status as the witness from becoming public. Thomas pulls the reader into Starr's life as she moves between two very different worlds highlighting the the way our life experiences taint our perception of ourselves and of others. As Starr fights with her friends and boyfriend as well as her family in the midst of a grief she hides even from herself, the reality that living two different lives never works crashes down on her and forces her to face the consequences that come with every choice she makes or avoids making. The Hate U Give is an intense, engaging, empowering, enlightening book that has the power to pull us closer to unity if we open our hearts to it. The Hate U Give is the kind of real world, issue based fiction that manages to entertain even as it pushes the reader to question their perceptions of the world around them. The Hate U Give had me longing for a happy ending of some sort while not wanting the book to end because then I'd have to say "goodbye" to the Carter family.

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