Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter lives in the poor, mostly Black neighborhood of Garden Heights and attends Williamson Prep, a mostly white private school across town, keeping the two Starrs carefully separate. Riding home from a party with her childhood friend Khalil, she watches a white police officer shoot him dead at a traffic stop — Khalil unarmed — and becomes the only witness to the killing the whole country is arguing about. As protests build and a grand jury weighs the officer's fate, Starr has to decide what her voice is for. Thomas expanded the novel from a short story she wrote after the police killing of Oscar Grant; it debuted at number one on the New York Times young-adult list and stayed for fifty weeks, and it has been among the most challenged books in American schools and libraries. A film adaptation followed in 2018.
Author: Angie Thomas · Original publisher: Balzer + Bray (New York), 2017
