The Hate U Give
ANDY’S RATING: ★★★
In cinemas tomorrow
RECENT “young adult” dramas have shown a fascination with futuristic worlds where teens are routinely terrorised.
In Hunger Games they were forced to butcher one another on a reality TV show.
In Maze Runner, they were stuck in a giant maze and cut to ribbons by robot spiders.
Things were no cheerier when they were infected with a virus and herded into concentration camps in The Darkest Minds
But Angie Thomas realised she didn’t need to turn to sci-fi for her 2017 novel The Hate U Give.
She knew that for many teens in racially divided America, life is grim enough in the here and now.
In this powerful adaptation, the dystopian world is a crime-ridden, poor, black neighbourhood.
We begin with a scene that may look like science fiction to Brits but will seem all too familiar to many African Americans.
A father (an excellent Russell Hornsby) is at the dinner table with his two young children. He is delivering an important lesson – how not to get murdered by the police.
It ends with the entire family pretending their dinner table is a car dashboard and meekly placing their outstretched hands on the surface. When we jump forward a few years, the cute little girl has grown into sensible 16-year-old Starr, played by talented Amandla Stenberg.
Her mother has decided their local school is a gateway to prison, so she has sent her and her half-brother to a white school in a middle-class neighbourhood.
Starr has learned to live a double life. At school, she knows to hide her scary “black mannerisms” so she can fit in with the sassy princess types you may remember from Degrassi or Beverly Hills 90210. She is hardworking, polite and has a nice, white boyfriend. At home, Starr appears a little too white for her black friends. At a raucous house party, she is ribbed for her fashion sense by Khalil (Algee Smith).
They have known each other since they were babies, and bonded playing Harry Potter.
But her reformed drug dealer dad disapproves of the books because he thinks the Hogwarts house system promotes gang culture.
It turns out that fate has seen their lives grow apart. Khalil now wears the designer threads of a drug dealer, having fallen in with a local crime lord to provide for his family. When