Young adult books offer look into teens’ complicated lives

Festival gives youths chance to interact with authors

Angie Thomas’s first novel started out as a short story for a college writing course. By the time she had fleshed it out into a book, 13 publishing houses were bidding for it.

Soon after, Fox 2000 won a bidding war for the film rights. And “The Hate U Give,” a novel for young adults, has been atop the bestsellers list since it came out last month.

Part of the novel’s success is in its timing: “The Hate U Give” is about the police brutality that spawned the Black Lives Matter movement, and there’s a ripped-from-theheadlines feel to the plot. But it’s also an excellent, well-written book.

Thomas is one of several writers who will be in Houston Saturday for TeenBookCon, a free festival that lets readers connect with writers of young-adult fiction. This year’s authors include Alexandra Bracken, Bill Konigsberg, Nina LaCour and featured keynote speaker Laini Taylor, a

National Book Award finalist. They’ll have panel discussions, answer questions and sign books at Alief Taylor High School.

“The Hate U Give” is a prime example of how vital, relevant and good the YA market has become, dealing with real issues and offering realistic glimpses of teenagers’ complicated lives. Thomas’s heroine, 16-year-old Starr, lives in a run-down black neighborhood but spends her days at a mostly white suburban prep school. She gets used to moving in two different worlds, but one night those worlds collide: Starr is in the car when Khalil, her childhood friend, gets pulled over by police and ends up dead at the hands of a white cop.

Khalil’s death becomes a national story. Protests erupt, and outsiders are quick to paint Khalil as a drug dealer who deserved what he got. Starr sees the way her black and white friends react differently to everything that happens. She watches her own neighborhood become ground zero for a race war. And as the shooting’s only witness, she has to decide what she’s going to do to set the story straight.

The story is heavy, but the heroine is unforgettable. In Starr, we get a smart, savvy girl who loves her family and stands up for what she believes in. She struggles with a complicated world that offers no certain answers.

“The Hate U Give” — its title comes from a Tupac Shakur lyric — is what Thomas calls “a mirror and a window.” Some readers will see a reflection of their own lives, and others will get a peek inside a life that is far different from their own.

“I’ve had older white conservatives reach out to me,” Thomas said. “They were like, ‘I wasn’t sure about this book but I read it, and now I’m glad I did.’ ”

Reading about other people’s lives, she said, is “the best way to get empathy.” But when Thomas was writing, she had kids like Starr in mind.

“Young black girls, they’re excited because they’re seeing someone who looks like them on the cover,” she said. “And I’ll have the young black boys (tell me), ‘I don’t like reading books, but I read yours in a day.’ ”

Thomas has heard from young readers who move between worlds the way Starr does, not knowing how to reconcile such separate spaces. And she has been there herself: Thomas grew up in a poor neighborhood in Mississippi, then went to college across town at a mostly white, Christian university.

“It was like a 10-minute drive between the two of them, but in that 10 minutes I moved through two different worlds,” she said. When a young black man named Oscar Grant was shot by police in California in 2009, she saw the starkly different reactions in those worlds. In her neighborhood, Grant was regarded as “one of our own”; at school, she heard him called a thug who was up to no good and probably deserved it.

“It angered me, and the only way I worked through those emotions was to write,” Thomas said.

Since then, she’s seen the same reactions to the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown — a long list of young black men killed by authorities. “The Hate U Give” feels more timely than it did when Thomas started writing it.

“Teenagers are affected

by it the most,” she said, so she knew she had to write a book for young adults. But at the same time, Thomas doesn’t want “The Hate U Give” to be considered an “issue book” about race or police brutality.

“There’s a lot of joy

in this book; there’s a lot of love in this book,” Thomas said. “It’s not just this girl dealing with the death of her friend. It’s a coming of age story, in a lot of ways.”