Entertainment Weekly - February 24 - March 3, 2017

his life bleeding out on the pavement as

she looks on helplessly from the passen-

ger seat, the chasm between her two

worlds only grows. Sitting in the school

cafeteria with her classmates just days

after Khalil’s death, she thinks numbly,

“I hope none of them asks me about my

spring break. They went to Taipei, the

Bahamas, Harry Potter World. I stayed in

the hood and saw a cop kill my friend.”

And when the case becomes a national

flash point, the breach only grows, forc-

ing hard choices on both sides: If she

testifies will it actually bring justice for

Khalil, or only reopen a still-raw wound

and send her further into herself?

The Hate U Givearrives with the kind of

frenzied hype—more than a dozen pub-

lishing houses battled for the manuscript;

the film rights have already been sold—

that can easily sink a first-time novelist.

But Thomas delivers with supreme style

and self-assurance, cannily balancing

pointed examinations of gun violence,

racial profiling, and political activism with

the everyday concerns of ordinary teen-

dom (boys, clothes, the profound embar-

rassment of watching your parents make

out). And she takes care to give the reader

real people, not merely props in a modern

morality play: Skin color doesn’t dictate

character any more than a badge does,

and choices aren’t strictly good or bad,

they’re just a consequence of living.Hate

engages in a crucial and strenuously cur-

rent conversation, but it also touches a

more universal pulse—digging beneath

hashtags and headlines to craft a portrait

of culture and community and young

womanhood that feels as fresh and neces-

sary as Starr’s indelible voice.A–

TITLEDead Letters | BY Caite Dolan-Leach

PAGES 332 | GENRE Novel

REVIEW BY Isabella Biedenharn @isabella324

Ava can hardly believe it when she hears that

her estranged twin, Zelda, has died in a fire—

and then cryptic posthumous emails from her

sister begin flooding her inbox.B+

The Pie-Chart Review!

When you describe a book to a friend,

you often need to compare it to other things.

So we’re here to help.

30%

Pretty

Little Liars

20%

Her Fearful

Symmetry

by Audrey

Niffenegger

20%

The Lying

Game

15%

Encyclopedia

Brown

Take s

the Case

by Donald

J. Sobol

10%

Z:ANovelof

Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese

Anne Fowler

5%

The Parent Trap

(1998 version)

EVERY WRITER ISA READER FIRST, AND

Dear Friend is Li’s haunted, luminous love

letter to the words that shaped her—from

the flowery Chinese verse of her youth to the brilliant

parade of poets, novelists, and Danish existentialists

who helped see her through multiple hospitalizations

for depression. (The heart wants what it wants; some-

times all it can stand is Kierkegaard.) Her own prose is

both lovely and opaque, fitfully illuminating a radiant

landscape of the personal and profound.B+

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write

to You in Your Life

BY Yiyun Li | PAGES 208 | GENRE Memoir

REVIEW BY Leah Greenblatt@Leahbats

FEBRUARY 24/MARCH 3, 2017 EW.COM 103

THOMAS: ANISSA HIDOUK