The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas

I am in awe of Angie Thomas’s accomplishment with this book. It has a moral without being moralistic and a message that creeps into your consciousness through believable, likable, and courageous characters, a complex and compelling storyline, and a city you can almost hear and smell, even though we have no idea where it actually is. 
This is a book about the importance of speaking out, despite the very real risks it presents. It’s also about community, with interconnected themes of belonging and loyalty woven with race, police brutality, and black identity.
That’s a lot to pack in, but Thomas does it so elegantly the reader falls in love with these amazing people facing a decision: Can they go on as usual or is it time to challenge the power structure? In this case, that structure includes the police department and district attorney on the one hand and a drug lord and his minions on the other. Caught between these two, which do you align with? What happens when the answer is “neither”?
At the center of the story is Starr, a smart and perceptive Black teenager who sees her childhood friend Khalil killed by a police officer after a traffic stop for a bad brake light. She struggles with her responsibility to Khalil, her community, family, and ultimately to herself. She’s terrified of telling the truth, which implicates both the officer and the drug kings, but she finally realizes she has no choice.
Starr straddles two different communities with different cultures and language. In the neighborhood, she is the grocer’s daughter, who sometimes works in his store. At her school in a ritzy white neighborhood, she is only as cool as she needs to be. She’s in that school because her parents know she will not get the education and opportunities she needs and deserves if she stays in the local school. She’s not a total fit in either place.
She has to leave parts of her behind when she goes to school—her language, her stories, and certainly the fact that she was in the car when Khalil was killed. If the white kids know too much, she fears, they’ll see her as a ghetto kid and dismiss her. Eventually, loyalty to her community and trust from her white friends help her speak out.
Thomas began this book when she was an undergraduate in creative writing at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. She says she chose to write it as a young adult novel to make it more accessible and relatable—and she succeeded.
The book was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, and the title comes from rapper Tupac Shakir’s THUG LIFE philosophy (and tatoo), an acronym for The Hate U Give Little Infants F*cks Everybody. Shakir says, “What you feed us as seeds, grows and blows up in your face.” When you force kids to live in a community that offers few opportunities besides drug dealing, you allow children to grow up broken and angry.  But those are our kids, even if they don’t look or act like us—or we like them—and their world is connected to ours. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Ideally, we would be motivated to help black children get the same benefits as white because that is simply part of a just society. But THUG LIFE reminds us that, no matter our motivation, our inaction will come back to hurt us all.
—Pat Prijatel

Near the Exit, by Lori Erickson

Being shown the world through the eyes of thoughtful people who are keen travelers and also engaging writers is a big treat to someone who doesn’t travel (me). Near the Exit: Travels with the Not So-Grim Reaper is a wonderful read and a thought-provoking discussion of death and death rituals.

As a huge fan of the movie Coco, I really enjoyed visiting the largest annual Day of the Dead celebration in Chicago with Erickson. Likewise, ancient Egyptian sites; nursing homes; the New Zealand Maori; Aztecs and Mayan ruins; funeral homes; the spiritual center in Crestone, Colorado; Assisi; and the Sacred Stone Circle at Harvest Preserve in Iowa City were each, in their way, fascinating destinations for conversations about death. After reading this book, I think I may be able to react to nursing homes with more peace and grace.

My favorite section of book is near the end, when Erickson describes what she saw at Eremo delle Carceri (a hermitage overlooking Assisi):

Just outside the building is a statue of Francis that’s the happiest depiction of a saint I’ve ever seen. It shows him lying on the ground, his hands behind his head, his sandals kicked off and ankles crossed, a contented smile on his face. Christianity might produce more saints if we pictured them like this, rather than carrying the tools of their martyrdom.

Erickson goes on to say:

When it came time for him to die, he wanted them (his brothers) to place his naked body on the ground, not long, just about the length of time it took someone to walk a mile.  . . . maybe he knew that after his death his bones—and his message—would become the property of the church, which would inevitably try to corral and domesticate the wild spirit he’d unleashed. Before that happened, he would have one last moment of communion with the earth he loved so much. It is said when Francis died, a chorus of larks wheeled and swooped above him for a long time, singing him home.

I’m not sure why that passage is so appealing. Maybe because it shows such a vibrant, living membrane between the spiritual and the physical–which is, indeed, something I sometimes, in lucky moments, feel.

Humans are apparently the only one of God’s creatures who grapple with their own mortality. In Near the Exit, Erickson shows us a way to circle closely to the inevitable and look at it without too much unease.

—Sharelle Moranville

Becoming, by Michelle Obama

In a nutshell, Becoming is a remarkable and inspirational story of an extraordinary woman. The book is a coming-of-age story; a love story of a pair of opposites; and a political saga by a woman who was skeptical, if not downright scornful of politics, but who became one of the most popular first ladies in American history.  

In telling her story, Michelle takes readers by the hand on an intimate tour of everyday African-American life and ambition, while recounting her rise from modest origins to the closest America has to nobility. Gracefully written and at times laugh-out-loud funny, she invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her from her childhood to the White House.

I particularly liked the titles of the three sections of the book. The first third (Becoming Me), covers her childhood, growing up in lower middle class in southside Chicago, with parents who made their high expectations clear. Despite her family’s challenges and her ‘female blackness’, she managed to go to Princeton, then Harvard Law, and then to work at a prestigious law firm where she met Barack, fell for him and his wanderlust, while Barack was grounded by her traditionalism. In the second section (Becoming Us), she covers their marriage, marriage counseling, raising two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare, winning the 2008 Iowa caucuses, and making it to the White House. But she never takes any of it for granted. On the contrary, her tone is one of wonderment as to how this all happened. Over and over again, from high school to the White House, she asks, “Am I good enough?”

She closes the last third of the book (Becoming More), talking about the stress of being in the spotlight, her desire to make an impact as First Lady, and the opportunity to offer her vision.  She knew that she would be held to a different standard, her every gesture scrutinized. Her story is not full of Washington gossip and political score-settling, though she does lay bare her contempt for Trump, who she believes put her family’s safety at risk with his false birther conspiracy theory.

Becomingis a warm, wise, revelatory and intimate, deeply personal coming-of-age story of a strong-minded girl who grew up to become one of the most powerful and influential black women in America. Her memoir sold more than 1.4 million copies in its first week and quickly became the best-selling book of the year. Through it all, her outlook is optimistic, her voice clear, witty, candid and insightful. She talks straight, with an openness and honesty rarely seen. She is gifted in her ability to express her emotions with meticulous attention to details, writing with tremendous insight and sensitivity from beginning to end. I loved it.

— Kenn Johnson