Ever pick up a book that has so many award stickers on it, your first thought is, “It can’t be THAT good?” And your follow up thought is, “If it won that many awards, there is no way I’m going to like it.”

Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give is THAT good. And I liked it. A lot.

The Hate U Give tells the story of Starr Carter, a 16 year old black girl living in the ghetto who witnesses the shooting of a childhood friend by a white cop. The story is timely to say the least, but it’s not a 444 page political rant. Yes, it’s intense and violent and heartbreaking.  It’s also a story about a loving family who believes to make a change, you need to be brave but you don’t have to be brave alone.

Starr inhabits a world far away from my own. What I knew of her world before I opened the book was based on news reports on cop shootings and gun violence on TV, and that made me nervous. Who was I to read this and could I understand it? But it only took a few pages in for me to recognize what it was about this story that was going to connect me, a middle-aged white suburban woman, to Starr’s life in the hood – her family.

Starr has an amazing family. They love, they fight, they swear at each other, they’re real. Most of all, they support each other. Dad is an ex-con/ex-gang member, dedicated to bettering his neighborhood. He pushes Starr to think for herself, at the same time teaching her how to protect herself. Mom is a registered nurse, a fierce protector of her family, a forceful voice of no-nonsense common sense. She doesn’t mother her children, but instead draws a line in the sand between acceptable and unacceptable and enforces it so no one dare cross it. Most importantly, Starr’s parents are a team, and Starr knows it. Yes, they argue, but Starr spends a lot of time describing how “cute” they are, too, and how she looks at them as the example of what she wants.

Starr’s parents are only the beginning of the family which is messy and tangled, some blood relations, some not, but all looking out for each other. It’s a family that keeps opening its arms and hearts to whomever needs to be part of it, because as Starr and her Chinese friend Maya agree, “Minorities need to stick together.”

Obviously, racism is what the book is all about, but I didn’t feel like I, the reader, was being accused of being racist or being told I had to go out and protest because I should. Instead, through sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes heartbreaking scenes, I felt I was being educated from multiple perspectives and asked to come to my own conclusions. Things aren’t always as they appear, and perhaps the thing I liked most about the book, was the feeling I was being urged to not just accept what is on the surface, but to look at things from all sides.

Yes, the book deserves all the award and accolades heaped on it. It’s about racism. It’s about gun violence and gangs. It’s about growing up, figuring out who you are and who you are going to be. It’s about the differences between black and white but also about how similar we can be as well. It’s about what it means to be a part of a family. And, it’s about how doing what is right sometimes means being brave even if it means being scared. That’s a lesson for all of us, no matter the color of our skin.

Read this one.