True Equality

True Equality

Written By: Kyle Mukire

The Hate U Give

Composed By: Angie Thomas

                 What is true equality to you? Do you believe we have achieved it as a society? As a race, will we truly ever be equal? The book "The Hate U Give" written by author Angie Thomas brought such questions to my mind, within the first 30 pages. The novel revolves around the protagonist, Starr Carter who is  a 16-year-old girl whose ethnicity is black. She witnesses a white police officer who shoots her best friend Khalil who was unarmed.  Before the shooting she had to cope with living a double life of living in a household with small income and going to a prep school. That night Starr was the only witness of what happened and she doesn't want to tell everyone because she might be treated differently and put her family in danger. She represents activism in itself throughout the book because she must stand up and fight for what she believes in.Will Khalil's death get the justice it deserves, or will society brush over it as we do today?
               "The Hate U Give" is an astonishing book where the author was able to take a real life issue and incorporate it into a modern teenager's life. I believe it was well thought and put together by the author. The thing that truly caught my eye was, the first letter of every word in the title of the book spelled out thug(The Hate U Give), which reminded me of Tupac's concept about thug life and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Quite frankly I have never read a book which I can relate to so much, it covers a lot of topics which I have read about and even brings emotion to those topics. When I first saw the book and read the small portion explaining it, I knew that this was the book for me. It talked about all of the activists which are my idols, like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, which really made me feel a connection with the book. A part of the book which was really well written was when the author talked about Starrs quick personality change after Khalil's death. Many people could  go insane after a loss of someone so close to them. The author talked us through her thoughts,dreams, and actions. I will continue to read the book to see how she develops as a character and what types of overall changes occur to her personality. But a recommendation to the readers is that you should hang on to the book, because the book starts off with a ton of action and returns to a normal subtle feeling, but it will rise again. 
               In all honesty, I would rate this book on a scale from 1-10 with ten being the best, and I would give it a 10. It was truly well written and made the reader want to continue reading. I would mostly recommend it to people interested in books about activism, revolutionaries, and civil disobedient figures.