The Hate You Give
This book doesn’t have a happy ending. Honestly a lot of real life doesn’t have a happy ending and we’ve grown so accustomed to this false idea of happily ever after that when somethng doesn’t end well, we feel almost…better?
Or maybe that’s just my experience.
The Hate U Give is an homage to Tupac and his idea, “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody,” or Thug Life. Angie Thomas, the author of The Hate U Give, takes this and weaves it into a story spanning from a rich, upper class, private school to a, well, I guess hood is the best way to describe it and the way a teenage African American girl has to navigate between the two worlds.
Honestly it’s so much more than that tho. Her friend is killed in a traffic stop, a gun is pulled on her by the same cop, her whole existence changes in the span of a few seconds and it will never be the same.
The book ends with an ending I wouldn’t want. An ending that leaves me wanting justice, wanting more, but I think that’s the point.
No matter what happy ending books give us, the truth of the matter is that life is much more complicated. We have to fight for more. We have to be ok with knowing that sometimes the bad guy wins, but we can’t let that demoralize us. Instead we have to allow it to invigorate us, to reaffirm our commitment to justice and what is right.