#hatelist

Author : Jennifer Brown

City/Publisher : Hachette Book Group

Copyright : 2009

Genre : Contemporary/Modern Fiction

Audience and Reading Level : 11 and up

Summary : Nick Levil is the only person who understands Valerie Leftman.  Valerie Leftman thought she knew everything about Nick Levil.   On the 2nd of May, Valerie finds out she doesn’t know Nick as well as she thought.  To Valerie their hate list was private and only meant as a way to vent.  Nick thought differently.  When Nick opens fire on the students on the list, Valerie inadvertently becomes a hero and a suspect.  After summer break, Valerie must go back to school alone and face the judgment, grief, and guilt head on.   With the help of therapy and unexpected friendship, Valerie begins to understand the power of words and unchecked anger and who she is outside of others expectations. 

Theme :

Hate :  Some would argue that love or fear are the most powerful emotion, but I believe hate wins this title.  Hate is easy, this makes it more powerful.  It’s easy to hate things.  Kids hate veggies, teens hate their parents, adults hate work, etc.  Valerie and Nick create the hate list as a way to cope with the bulling and anger they are experiencing.  It was not born out of evil but out of the powerlessness that they experienced due to feeling misunderstood and rejected.  The issue comes into play when hate becomes unchecked.  While Valerie never took her feelings further than creating the hate list and talking about it, Nick uses it as justification for his violent actions.  When hate is fed by personal trauma and lack of support it can easily become unchecked which leads to irreversible destruction.  This book is almost a warning of what can happen when people are not supported and drown in the hate.  It also shows how school culture and social dynamics can contribute to a culture where hate thrives.  Throughout the story Valerie comes to realize that adults and students were ignoring the hate, and they didn’t understand what the consequences of that could be.  There is also the aspect of how hate can exist in the same space as love.  Valerie loves Nick but she also has to come to accept that he did violent hateful things that hurt people.  This brings forward the fact that there is a lot of grey areas when it comes to human emotions.  The book also brings about how you have to move past the hate through forgiveness and healing.  Throughout the book we see how Valerie goes to therapy and returns to school.  She has a shift from feeling hate to having understanding and from anger to healing.

Accountability : The lack of accountability and eventual taking of accountability is shown throughout the book.  First, we have Valerie who flits back and forth between thinking she is responsible for the school shooting and knowing she didn’t have any part of Nick’s plans.  Yes, Valerie didn’t actually pull the trigger or plan the shooting itself but she did help create the Hate List that targeted the victims.  Throughout the story she learns to accept that she did have a part in the horrific incident, even though she never intended any harm.  She also learns a harsh lesson in understanding that words and intentions have real-world consequences.  Now, lets move on to Nick.  Due to the fact Nick ends up committing suicide at the end of the shooting, he is never able to be held accountable for his actions in the traditional sense.  Through Valerie’s memories of Nick we see that he was kind and loving to her but he never accepted how deeply his hatred and pain were influencing himself and others.  The book does a great job of highlighting how systemic failures in the school and community led to the shoot and how they could lead to another.  They ignored the bullying and social isolation before the shooting and after.  Before the shooting, the teachers/staff ignored and brushed off the bullying and alienating behaviors.  This led to a culture where bullying was seen as normal and no one does anything to stop it.  “We all laughed at it.  We all saw it happening and turned away.” After the shooting the principle and reporters spread false news that the school has come together and that there is no bullying anymore.  They do performative things like the “Garvin Strong” slogan at school rallies or building memorials.  They try to force closure on the issue without confronting the truths behind it which leads to the students having internalized anger, bias and cruelty that can only feed into a cycle of hate.  Valerie reflects on how people only see Nick as a villain and her as a traitor but don’t reflect on how they contributed to the toxic culture that led to the shooting.  The interviews that are shown at the beginning of some of the chapters is a great example.  In these interviews many of the people talk about how they didn’t even know Nick or how the victims didn’t know Nick, when in reality they helped to bully him.

Being true to yourself : Throughout the book, Valeire is learning to accept that the Nick she knew was capable of horrific things.  One of the things she reflects on is how her own interactions with the hate list changed due to Nick.  At first the hate list was just a list to vent through but when Nick started to talk about actually wanting bad things to happen to the people on the List, Valerie slowly starts to talk the same way without even realizing it.  She starts to understand that she was shaped by Nicks anger and that their relationship wasn’t healthy even though she found comfort in it.  Learning to separate your own values from someone you loves values is a hard thing to do.  For Valerie, she was in denial about who he really was because she loved him and in order to heal she had to separate what was her values and what was Nicks.  After the shooting, the world sees Valerie as “the shooter’s girlfriend” and “the girl who wrote the list.”  She has to struggle with understanding who she is outside of her connection to Nick and the shooting.  Valerie has to understand who her identity is without the influence of how others see her.  Throughout the story we see how isolated Valerie is after the shooting.  Most of her friends have abandoned her and her parents don’t understand her but she starts to build up her own strength by being honest even when its hard, to both herself and others.  She also fights to find the courage to change and to choose who she actually wants to be.  The book does a good job of showing how being true to yourself is a constant process that involves questioning, forgiveness and realizing your own power.

Reaction :

I can truly say I loved this book.  It was well written, easy to follow, and relatable.  Jennifer Brown does an amazing job at showing us how complex emotions can be.  Normally I don’t like books that switch back and forth between past and present but in this book, I think it’s necessary to be able to fully understand Valerie.  You can feel Valeries pain, confusion, love, and growth.  Brown created characters you can understand, even the bullies who just went along with it because they didn’t want to cause waves and Nick who was drowning in the hate.  While the circumstances in the book are extreme, you are able to relate to how Valerie felt misunderstood both before and after the shooting and you feel her need to escape in your soul.   Most people can probably relate to Valeries struggle with understanding and accepting how someone she loves could do something so horrible.  We can all relate to her struggle to figure out who she is outside the influence of others. 

Something I think is an important question to ask after reading this book is “Can someone be good if they have made a horrible mistake?”.  I think this goes hand in hand with the thought that one wrong choice can undo every good choice you have ever made.  While what Nick did was in no way acceptable, his pain is understandable which makes him an empathetic villain.  He was kind to Valerie and to those who were kind to him.  He was smart as shown by his literature collection but he was given a shit hand at life and had no one to help him work through his pain.  So does his one extremely bad choice erase everything else about him?

But they were stories, that’s all. He told stories about death. He recounted movies, books, all with tragic and meaningful death scenes. He talked about news reports and crime reports. It was just his thing. And I adopted his language; I told stories, too. It was no big deal.