The Hate U Give

This is the story of 16-year-old Starr, a girl who witnesses her life-long friend get killed by a police officer while unarmed. She balances between two worlds while the murder makes national news: the one where she lives surrounded by non-traditional families and neighbors who've seen it all and gangbangers and business owners in a black community filled with people whose choices are never easy, and the one where she goes to a mostly-white private school at which she becomes a completely different version of herself so nobody knows about her home world. But it's so much more than that. And that's why I am going to ask people who can't relate to this story to read it as soon as they possibly can.The reason I believe reading books by people who aren't your and your experience's doppelgänger is important is because it allows us to pluck at the threads of truth about other peoples' lives, experiences, secrets at our own pace and in our own heads as we go along (note: I am white). We get to know them, see them, emotionally connect with them. Read enough of these stories, and we become able to see the real people in our world who are represented by those characters. We become more empathetic to and more understanding of their situations, even when they are so vastly different from our own that our knee-jerk reactions to their real-life words/actions/decisions tend to be denial, rejection. A disbelief because it doesn't seem right or doesn't feel comfortable.

Reading these stories connects us in a way our world needs right now. I can't say I can relate but I have been bullied and made to feel that being different is a bad thing and this book makes me want people to be more accepting and be more accepted.