Instinctively parents protect their children. From swatting the toddler’s hovering hand away from the hot oven, to desperately praying the five-year-old can handle the thoroughfare of school, to anxiously wait-ing for the teenager to come home from an evening outing. We worry about our children, and do all we can to ensure safe travel through the world.
These instincts reach into the realms of watching, reading and listening as we seek to guard our children from wayward influences wherever we can. As Christians, we are all the more concerned, rightly recognising that the majority of the media that our young people will be exposed to will not be advocating gospel-shaped views or ways of living.
Threat or opportunity?
After reading a few pages of the young adult’s novel, The Hate U Give, you might well be reaching for that protective shield and instinctively not want your teenager to read it. There’s gun crime, cussing and messy familial relations.
But before we retreat, trying to keep that guard up, I wonder if it’s this sort of book that can help our young people navigate the fast-approaching real world. They will encounter the realities of racism, death, revenge and forgiveness as they see the world through the eyes of Starr, a black teenager who lives in an American neighbourhood riddled with gangs and gun crime. With gospel bearings intact, a young reader can see through ‘myriad eyes’ – as C.S. Lewis puts it – and gain empathy, understanding and emotional depth as they travel beyond their context and into another.
This debut novel offers a gritty, but often humorous, insight into a teenager’s world as she rides the emotional, legal and societal waves created by being the only eye witness as her oldest friend is shot by a cop. She lives in a deprived neighbourhood that is characterised by violence, but also loyalty. There are the gangs, but there are also extended and disjointed families and friends who are watching each other’s backs. There are dysfunctional households with frequent abuse, but then, amidst it all is Starr’s unexpectedly functional family.
Racism
The underlying tension throughout the novel is racism. The cop is white, and Khalil – the friend – was black. Starr and her brother go to a predominantly white private school outside of their neighbourhood, and are constantly having to evaluate and check their identity. Starr’s neighbours, friends and family have had lifetimes of being mistreated, and the shooting is potential touch-paper to the embers of hatred and resentment that run through the normal residents as much as the local gangs. Amidst the drama, our teenage protagonist is running the gauntlet at school with her ‘other’ friends and her controversially white boyfriend.
Hope for a broken world?
It made me cry, it made me think and it helped me understand, if only in part, a life a far cry from my own. The writer shows us a deeply broken world, with a constant cry for it to be fixed. The cries often go unheard, and even when they are heard, there seems to be little that can be done. Hope comes through heroes and heroines – like Starr and her father, and freedom is sought through escape from gang life and the ghetto. The hope is always for a better ending, one without young people being shot.
The reader encounters the shocking reality of our broken world through this narrative. As we see fractured lives and relationships, so we recognise our sin-sick world and its need for a saviour, a hero who brings the best ending that ultimately carries us into eternity.
For the right-aged individual, and with eyes and heart anchored in the gospel, fiction like this can equip and enrich for real-world adventures ahead. The hurt and anger prompts us to love our neighbour, whatever their race. The silenced minorities make us want to champion those who are trampled under society’s feet. The broken world shows us the real need to hold out lasting, God-given hope to all.
There are times when it’s best to avert our young peoples’ eyes and ears, but there are others when gritty, ugly reality might just prompt gospel engagement in ways we hadn’t imagined.
THE HATE U GIVE
By Angie Thomas
Walker Books. 464 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 406 372 151
