Books for young adults take on serious topics with humor, insight

“The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas. (Balzer + Bray, 464 pages, $17.99.)

It can be challenging for a project as lengthy as a novel to keep up with the headlines. But Angie Thomas lands in the middle of a national conversation on race and policing with her young-adult novel “The Hate U Give.”

From the opening chapter, we see the tug of identities faced by Starr Carter, who has grown up in poor and black Garden Heights but is now an outsider to her friends because she attends wealthy, mostly white Williamson Prep. Starr is driving home from a house party with a childhood friend, Khalil, when a police officer pulls them over. The encounter quickly turns deadly when the officer shoots and kills Khalil. Immediately afterward, local news media and the officer portray Khalil as a drug dealer and a threat. But those in Garden Heights know him as someone different, the son of an addict who had few paths to pull himself up.

Thomas leavens painful truths with laugh-out-loud moments as Starr navigates her “uncool” status in the black community, swaps quips with her “Fresh Prince” loving white boyfriend and survives her dad’s tendency to mix Harry Potter references with truths from the ‘hood.

“The Exo Project” by Andrew DeYoung. (Boyds Mills Press, 455 pages, $18.95.)

St. Paul, Minn., writer Andrew DeYoung opens his dystopian first novel on a future Earth rendered almost inhabitable by solar radiation. Desperate to pay for his mother’s cancer care, 17-year-old Matt signs up for the Exo Project, a long-shot mission that sends out spaceships in search of a habitable planet.

A hundred light years away, he arrives on the planet Gle’ah, where he finds a race of empaths living in preindustrial villages run by councils of women. When Matt falls in love with a village leader, Kiva, he must decide whether to allow his destructive species to colonize the new planet.