The Hate List by Jennifer Brown
Everyone has those books they come across and, almost to their own surprise, do not want to put them down…for whatever reason. While reading Jennifer Brown’s The Hate List, I found myself not paying attention when my husband was speaking to me, ignoring one of my most favorite TV shows, and avoiding sleep at all costs to keep reading…”just one more chapter!”
Valerie Leftman isn’t popular. In fact, Valerie spends much of her time at school and on the way to school being picked on, called mean names, degraded. Valerie fights to take back some dignity and control through her spiral-bound notebook, her Hate List. For Valerie the Hate List is a cathartic exercise – putting in print everything and everyone she hates, from her Algebra homework and her parents’ arguments, to the superstar jock who picks on her and her boyfriend. But for Valerie’s boyfriend, Nick, the Hate List becomes a seriously hateful enterprise; one day in May, Nick opens fire in their high school, killing several, injuring many (including Valerie), and then turning the gun on himself. Now Valerie is left to pick up the pieces of her life, to deal with the love she had for a guy who could perpetrate such acts of violence and to negotiate living in a town where many assume she is an equally guilty party.
The Hate List proves an incredibly unique and powerful novel, allowing readers to witness the events leading up to the school shooting, the shooting itself and the aftermath. The narrative is sophisticated, providing glimpses between the “present” and “past”-pre-shooting, the ”past”-post-shooting and “present,” and interspersed with newspaper clippings about the shooting and its victims. This title is the author’s debut and I was very surprised not to see it as one of the William C. Morris honor books! Jennifer Brown is definitely an author to watch!
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