Plot:
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter navigates between the poverty-stricken neighborhood she has grown up in and the upper-crust suburban prep school she attends. Her life is up-ended when she is the sole witness to a police officer shooting her best friend, Khalil, who turns out to have been unarmed during the confrontation – but may or may not have been a drug dealer. As Starr finds herself even more torn between the two vastly different worlds she inhabits, she also has to contend with speaking her truth and, in the process, trying to stay alive herself.

Thoughts:

The story opens at a typical teenage party. Girls and boys dancing, music blaring - and then gunfires.

Starr hurriedly left the party along with her childhood friend Khalil. On their way home they are pulled over by cops. I was surprised the story turned tense, forgetting the age-old  problem of police brutality against black people and systemic racism. They did not do anything wrong other than fleeing a dangerous place. I was naive enough to think that they didn't have to worry because they weren't guilty of anything. But Khalil didn't live to see another day and Starr had to live with the trauma of witnessing her bestfriend, actually two bestfriends, die.

Khalil's death attract the national news but color him as a thug and a drug dealer which may or may not be true. But really that should not have been the focus because a cop just killed a teenager and that is murder and he should be jailed but that is not what's happening.

The whole book doesn't just revolve around the case and Starr being the star witness, after all she is but a teenager, with her own teenager problems. Like all other teenagers in her age, Starr has identity problems. One as Starr from Garden Heights and the other as the cool black girl basketball varsity player at Williamson Prep. The two places are the most polar opposite, Garden Heights being a hood where gang wars and shootings are the norm, while as Williamson Prep is a posh private school where most of the students are white and well off.

I feel that without Starr's family, she wouldn't have that strength to go on and tell her side of the story. It was very important that she had a father and a mother that understood all too well the consequences and the goings on if they push through. Although they knew their family would be in one way or another in danger because of Starr as witness, they still went through with it because it was the right thing to do and they were genuinely hoping that there would be no more Khalils.

I cannot describe the roller coaster of emotions I felt reading this book. There was warmth from Starr's family, an adoration for her parents that give and give selflessly for their kids and others and the community that is Garden Heights. Though they left the neighborhood in the end I feel that they have done enough and that it was not a betrayal at all. Saddened that Starr had to cut off some ties with the person she considered her best friend because of the unknowing racial slurs she throws at Starr and her other friend which has Chinese ethnicity. The fact that the friend couldn't recognize her faults was definitely not okay. Starr's troubled relationship with her white boyfriend. They adore each other but Starr has some issues being that he doesn't know what it's like sometimes in Starr's life, but he actually pulled through in the end and impressed them all, even Starr's dad.

This book is definitely a classic. It's timely, important and most importantly it has a message not only to Americans, but to all the people of different races. Please read this book!

Rating:
5 stars

Quotes: