Review: Hate List

[Nicole Priester]

The book I read for this week was "Hate List" by Jennifer Brown. This book is about a now senior (Valerie Leftman) dealing with the aftermath of a hate book she and her boyfriend created over a three year period which lead to a school shooting by her boyfriend Nick Levil. Valerie a long with many of her classmates, were shot or killed by Nick, and some in fact many feel that Valerie was apart of the shooting and that Nick only shot her because they made a suicide pact. Valerie also has a lot of stuff to deal with at home and long with dealing with her feelings about the people on the list, her boyfriend and herself. This book deals with her healing and finding out who she is after a tragic event.

I can see where this book is considered a Young Adult Literature piece, and I would happen to agree even though it does not fit most of the critiera set fourth to us. Parents and adult figures are pretty present through out the novel. They also have a lot of influence on her life before and after the shooting. While the story primarely focuses on Valerie, it also tells a tale about her parents and her brother. GIven the nature of the story, I feel it is only natural that the parents would be involved as much as they are. It would be very unnatural if Valerie was dealing with everything all on her own without anyone.The book is written from Valeries perspective, so that fits the criteria, but I feel like she uses language that is above what most teenagers would know or use. These words would make great vocabulary lessons though. The book deals with a lot of issues and emotions teens do go through, but not all teens do. All the students and families are dealing with the aftermath or a tragic event. They are also dealing with their own insecurities that the reader finds out later in the novel. There are suicide throughts and attempts of suicide, finding ones self, dealing with parents that are unhappy in marriage, affairs, guilt, shame and so on. The story does not really talk about race and things like that. some characters do have ethnic names, but does disect kids from different social groups which is very interesting and unique.

Some interesting Links... that are provided at the end of the book

http://www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/kids/

http://www.meangirlsnotcool.com



This book is very interesting and I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. It definately was not what I expected. While it was definately an emotional roller coaster the reader is on with Valerie. I definately became invested in her, but I kind of kept thinking what it would be like to get into the minds of all these other characters/survivors and see what they were going through. Valerie does become this very dynamic character and it is amazing to watch her transform. she is a character that you want to cheer for and you want to see do well. There are times where I got frustrated with her parents, but it is very hard to blame them for how they feel. I really would love to teach this book in a class, but I really feel there are only two context where it would be appropriate for this book to be taught. The first would be in a modern lit class and I would want to teach it with a book also about a school shooting called "We Need to Talk about Kevin" and the other would be as giving students a list of books to chose from and have lit cirlces. there are a lot of valuable life lessons learned, but known a lot of technique used to right the book really. I feel class discussions would focus on the context of the book, and nothing about how the book was written which is fine, but I feel there should be a good blend between the two and this does not have it. I also think to some extent it would be hard to talk about the subjects in this book. I personally come from a high school with a lot of tradgety. I also went to NIU for a year and knew a couple of people who were shot at the NIU shooting. These factors had a lot to do with why i chose this book, but it was also very hard to read the book because of that. Teaching in Illinois, or any school that has had a history of tradgety it would be hard to talk about this stuff, especially because it is such a small world and someone in the classroom could have been affected by something that is examined in that book. I would be nervous to teach it as much as i would want to.