The debut novel from Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give , takes its title from an extemporaneous monologue delivered by rap icon Tupac Shakur. In it, he expands his interpretation of gangsta rap’s main trope: the criminal and revolutionary identity he calls ‘thug life’. As he sees it, thug life is a response to the inherent racism and classism of American politics and culture. The novel explores this concept over the course of the plot, which centers on a police shooting witnessed by the protagonist, a young black woman named Starr. The book most resembles the events in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown, but the book’s city, Garden Heights, is fictional-- which is to say, this resembles what happens everywhere so much so that we don’t need to imagine a specific city at all. The novel avoids becoming a polemic by situating the bulk of the conflict and driving action in Starr’s interior experience. The story is really about how this particular young woman navigates the