Book Reviews - The hate u give & the sun is also a star

Today we are drinking some PearDrax because I don't drink alcohol and we are going to be talking about the The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon So we'll start off with The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon. Both of these books by the way are super hyped so I don't really want to focus too much on telling you what it's about I think you get the gist of this book it's set in New York it takes place during the course of one day it follows two main characters we have first of all Natasha who is Jamaican- American and her family are set to be deported at the end of this day and then we have Daniel who is Korean-American and he is going to do an interview to get into Yale but he doesn't really want to do an interview to get into Yale he's just doing it to appease his parents. The book follows the two of them until they cross paths and this is kind of where they start to fall in love however this book does explore explicitly the trope of insta-love or falling in love at first sight. So it's not like that's ignored, it's actually one of the basic premises of the story and I have to say overall I think this book for what it was was well absolutely well done, Nicola Yoon manages to get you gripped Natasha's situation she doesn't shy away from the very dark nature of that particular situation, however she does such a good job at interweaving the romance into the story and balancing it out with that and I just I couldn't believe how she was able to compress all of these things during the course of one day for this book was just such a testament to how good Nikola Yoon is as a writer. I think the romance has done really well and this I am one of those people who's a bit slightly a little bit kind of sort of skeptical about it because, I mean listen, it takes place during the course of one day they fall in love and what she does really justify well the idea of falling in love at first sight or falling in love at Second Sight, I just couldn't grapple with the fact that these were two people who just met like the romance the romance dynamic between the two of them was so well done but I just whenever I reminded myself that they knew only knew each other for a few hours then that's kind of where I just go like... Okay then. And then there's the fact that Natasha is being deported at the end of the day or is said to be deported at the end of this she's actually trying to put a stop to it but she's just you know she, she be listening to her music she be singing karaoke she be getting these mens. I'm not trying to say that's unrealistic I mean sometimes you're in a situation like that you might like effort i'ma just live up my life. I was just that if that was me I'd have been having like sex anxiety attacks in a row, so I mean props to Natasha. however the romance dynamic as I said was done absolutely well it was cute it was swoon worthy if you're the kind of person who likes OTPs and ships and all that gonna other *** then this book might appeal to you quite a lot and the writing has very fast I'm consumable so this is something you could sit down and just read in a day moving on to the issues of immigration and race, first of all I love the interracial relationship aspects of this book because this is an interracial relationship that you don't particularly see all the time usually whenever we hear about interracial relationships it's usually like a black person or white and a white person or just like a white person on any other like race that is not white. I really like that we had a different kind of mix with that here and it is my kind of semi based on Nicola Yoon's experience because she is Jamaican American but she's also married to a Korean American man. I really felt the [Gibrish] I felt that in this book when it came to the romance I thought that the issues of immigration itself was handled really well does kind of humanize the experience especially in the context of places like the United States and France and all these are the "First World" countries that ah just really being *** about immigration and I just have these really harmful ideas about what an undocumented immigrant is. Put yourself in their shoes instead of just you know whining and I'm like complaining that oh my God like the country is going to *** because I'm a nobody country's going to *** because of you. Let me not go there that's a touchy area but I will say that this book is just an excellently constructed book as I said before um the only thing is I just don't feel like this is the book that will stick with me um it was very enjoyable in the moment but for some reason it's not resonating with me in the way that I would have wanted it to but I absolutely adored it I think it's absolutely important especially given the context of the United States and all these other countries as said before and I definitely think that you should go ahead and give this one I read I gave it four stars. Speaking of like context of the United States we have The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and I decided to review both of these books together because they both really do kind of like address current issues in a way that haven't really been addressed and a lot of the YA contemporary books that I usually read this one has been blowing up all over the place it is it's a to become a movie I was said to become a movie even for the book came out at the end of February and everybody is talking about it everybody loves it and I'm so glad that this book is so hyped and so talked about and so well-received because it's absolutely worth all of the hype that you have been hearing about. So The Hate U Give is about Starr who's an African-American girl and one day she's coming home from a party with her childhood best friend Khalil and they are pulled over and Khalil is shot unarmed unwarranted by a police officer in cold blood a white police officer and the book just kind of takes off from there. Obviously this book is heavily influenced by current events as well and the Black Lives Matter movement and the specific issue of police brutality in the United States and how people try to make certain ideas out of the victims of these crimes and try to paint them in a way where they should be deserving of what happens to them. So this book deals with that but it's not only that you would think that it's just about her dealing with that but it's so much more toward her living between two lives that she attends a predominantly white school but she lives in a predominantly black lower-class neighborhood so she's grappling with these two very different worlds and she talks about code-switching and just being two completely different individuals in these two completely different contexts. It also has an interracial relationship kind of thing woven into it as her boyfriend Chris is white. So the story also plays a little bit of a part in her dynamic with him. And there's also a lot of friend- like this book is one of those books that balance friendship and romance and family really well however the romance aspect of this book is just not the main thing it the book could have done without it and that's what I really liked about it because normally with these YA contemporary the groom intends to take over everything but in this book even though it's done absolutely well it does not take over it's like completely in the background this book is really about star and her family her parents who are among the best parents I've ever read about in YA, her brothers her friends everything in here you see the thing about this book is that if I start on everything then I won't stop I will just leave all the themes and all of that out of this for now because I feel like everybody has covered that more eloquently [than] me and I want to talk about the more the more objective stuff about this book when I say objective I don't really know what I'm saying I'm just using it as a term to refer to like writing, character, plot, all of that stuff holy *** this book was so freakin good Angie Thomas this writing is very sincere it's very honest and it does a really good job at bringing all of these issues and unweaving it into the story the only issue I would say is that um sometimes I feel like she could have been a bit more subtle with the messages that she's trying to put forward now and again like you'd just be reading and then BOOM *message* you know, [but] at the same time especially if it's a younger reader reading this book they kind of need that message to be in their face and this is also auntie Thomas's first book so you can't expect it to be perfect in every single write with regards to plot again holy *** this book is so enthralling this is the kind of book that will keep you up late at night. I mean I it took me a while to read it because I made the mistake of stopping it before exams and I had to stop and then start back after exams but the last 100 pages though, wooh whew. The last 100 pages in this book had me like on my like I was upside down *** reading at *** because that's why I like everything start to get super intense like imagine drinking like like hot chocolate and then you reach the end words like really rich at the bottom that is how the end of the last 100 is in this book is, whoo okay let's move on. The characters though are the strong point of this story if it's anything that Angie Thomas has, is that she has an extreme talent of writing realistic, lovable, human, flawed characters. None of the characters here are squeaky clean as TheBookArcher puts it. regardless of whoever is like a drug dealer whoever has like a criminal past and stuff like that Angie Thomas humanizes the situation in the sense that she is telling you okay that's not all they are you have to understand with a lot of working-class communities all over the world people don't choose to be a certain way people don't just go eh I want to be a drug dealer because that sounds like fun because it's not fun. Because of how they are rejected by the mainstream society they are forced into these different scenarios and different situations the best character in this book who stole the entire story for me who was I want to be this *** when I grow up was Starr's grandmother oh my God this woman oh my God. I love the part where she was like, what? I can't I can't even find it because I tabbed up so many things she wasn't like she was swirlin' when she was her age and she was like swirl on girl and I was like oh my God. Anyways I'm going to end this here on by saying that I gaveThe Hate U Give five stars I want to give this five stars deserves times that it's getting five stars from me even if I change my mind it still gets five stars because it deserves five stars. That was my review for this one is also stabbed by Nicola Yoon and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Please go fix your life and read these books especially if you like YA contemporary you will appreciate these books but even if you don't like YA contemporary, you will love these books because they are incredible, they are important, they are necessary and they need to be read, and need to be even more hyped and more promoted than they already are. So in the comments on me let me know what you thought of The Hate U Give and The Sun is Also a Atar if you've read them. Thank you so much for watching I hope you have a lovely, lovely day and until next time, Inshallah, keep reading.