Review: Hate List

Today I bring you my first review. It is on the 2010 release Hate List by Jennifer Brown.

Summary: After Valerie Leftman's boyfriend, Nick, opens fire on their school cafeteria, Val is shot trying to stop him, but is implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create. Now, Val is forced to confront her guilt as she returns to school to complete her senior year. A "School Library Journal" Best Book of the Year.

My Thoughts: *SPOILERS*


I finished this novel in two days, and then I took about half an hour to think about it. Jennifer Brown is one of those rare young adult writers who writes about real teenagers with real world issues. There are no mysterious and dreamy teenage boys for our main character. There are no vampires or werewolves or anything else supernatural lurking in the shadows. There are just painfully real characters struggling with the aftermath of a horrific thing.

What makes this novel so great – and yet so frustrating – is that the characters are real. So much so that they seem like people you go/went to high school with.

Our story is told by Valerie, who is perhaps the most frustrating of the characters. She’s a thousand teenage girls: strong, unsure, self-centered, selfish, kind, and intelligent. What really got me about Valerie is she spends the novel looking at the shooting as if it only happened to her. She views her past as Nick and Valerie against the rest. Us against Them. She almost views people as stereotypes. She seems them as bullies who came after her and Nick for no reason. It’s not until she starts talking to the victims of the shooting that she begins to see that things aren’t always so black and white.

Chris, the jock who always gave Nick a hard time? He was the boyfriend of Nick’s first friend after moving to town, Ginny. Chris was just a jealous kid acting out. In fact, most of the victims of the shooting didn’t really know Nick or Valerie, but somehow they made it on the famous ‘Hate List’. Some for major things, like bullying. But others for the smallest of things, like refusing to let Nick borrow a truck or for just hanging around people Nick and/or Valerie disliked. It went to show just how self-centered teens can be.

In fact, I would say that this novel just shows how self-centered teens are, and how they just don’t always understand what their words and actions do to others. Valerie doesn’t even stop to think about the ways her friends – and the friends of Nick – have been affected by the shooting. Nor does she really stop to think about the victims who lived. Not until she is forced – my life or herself - to interact with them.

One thing I really loved about the novel was the way that some chapters started with little blurbs about the victims in the shootings. It made things more real for me. Another thing I loved was the way the school was portrayed afterward. The principal and media try to say the school is more peaceful, and it does seem that way. But, there are small moments that let us – and Valerie – see that things haven’t changed as much as the media would like the outside world to think.

One thing I really disliked about the novel was that the characters weren’t given much depth or development. We saw Nick through Val’s eyes, so there were moments – in flashbacks – where we saw a smart and lonely child with some deep seeded issues. Valerie got a bit of development. But, characters like Jessica, Ginny, Stacey, Frankie etc came off a bit flat. But, I suppose that’s because we were seeing them through Val and Valerie’s thoughts weren’t so much on them as on the past with Nick and the aftermath.

I think what I’ll take away from this novel is that people see what they want to see. Valerie and Nick saw their classmates as bullies, and their classmates saw them as outcasts or ‘weird quiet kids’. But, they were all so much more than this. As all people are truly more than anyone sees.

This was a great novel about a real issue. 4 out 5 stars.