Monday, August 12, 2013

The Hate List by Jennifer Brown



The Hate List by Jennifer Brown is a powerful novel about school violence, love, forgiveness, understanding, loss and healing.

Valerie Leftman is returning to her high school on the first day of her senior high school.  It should be a time of celebration, leaving high school behind and preparing for hopefully bright futures.  Valerie returns with a pain in her leg, stares, whispers and public outbursts of rage as to why she is allowed in the school at all.  This is all because her boyfriend took a gun to school the previous May, shot several students, killing some, wounding others, including Valerie, who tried to stop it before turning the gun on himself.  This is also because Valerie helped create "The Hate List" of students, staff and people who Valerie and Nick wanted gone.  As a joke, Valerie thought... a reality in Nick's mind.

The story flips back and forth in time.  One timeline is focused on the now as she struggles to make it day by day through school and a family that doesn't trust or understand her.  Another goes back to the time she spent with her boyfriend that she adored leading up to the day where he brings the gun to school.  Valerie is quite understandably a troubled and confused teenager.  She doesn't understand who she is or who her boyfriend is that it led to that day.  She never meant any of the list to bring any real harm to anybody, but it's hard for anybody to believe this.  She also faces a very hard home life where her parents fight, her mother doesn't trust her to not hurt herself or anybody else and her father seems to hate her and unable to forgive her for her part in the violence.

This book is very intense and hard to read at times.  You feel such empathy for her and so many of the characters in this book.  The reasons for this violence aren't and can't be explained.  It's really attempting to heal and learning how to forgive and move on with life after such a horrific action.  While I would argue the book ties things up a little nicely at the end, the author doesn't provide solutions.  Hate, anger, cruelty, bullying and gossip are never leaving our schools, but this books offers up the ideas of empathy and understanding to teens.  A book a lot young people could relate to on different levels.

The Hate List is located in the YA section under the author Brown.  It was on the Iowa High School Book Award List for 2012-2013, where students in 9-12 nominate and vote for the favorite books. For more information on this title, check out: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6316171-hate-list 

Liz

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