“I’ll never give up.
I’ll never be quiet.
I promise.”
The Hate U Give, 444

Race has been a historic excuse to dehumanize others, and stories such as The Hate U Give counteract that lie with an abundance of humanness. “Your voices matter,” Angie Thomas says to every kid in all ‘the Gardens’ of the world, “your dreams matter, your lives matter. Be roses that grow in the concrete.” The untold stories matter so much; their beauty will grow in the difficult, hard world and they will change it. We need to change the narrative, the human story, of America, and that depends on stories like this. We can turn the concrete world into a garden.

The violence, painful truths, and heartache of BIPOC stories are difficult to read and incredibly pertinent to the narrative of humankind. Thomas’s debut novel, The Hate U Give, provides a depth of characters, scenes, and experiences from an array of perspectives about being Black in the South, in the U.S.A.

The main character, Star, struggles with her identity and observes how her brothers, parents, friends, boyfriend, mentors, lawyer, and uncle each represent a differing and complex situation of how to be in a world of racism. I cried because Star’s teen life reminds me of my own teen grief and loneliness. She reminded me how difficult a friend’s cruelty can be to manage, how crippling sorrow is at the death of a loved one, how confusing choices and consequences are, how terrifying family instability is, how learning to accept myself left me depleted and alone, and all of the thousands of pressures and sorrows of a young girl. But then I cried because Star’s story was all caged within racism.

Stars fictional story reflects a human story: relatable and entirely foreign. A story that helps to balance the human narrative.