When Bri’s mother loses her job (as a secretary at a church, as it happens), and the family is faced with running out of food and then eviction, Bri has to fast-track her ambitions. The book’s protagonist, 16-year-old Bri, is obsessed with hip-hop – as Thomas herself is – and wants to make it as a rapper. But while her debut was more issue-led, On the Come Up is perhaps more personal to Thomas. Like THUG, it is set in Garden Heights, a fictional inner-city neighbourhood that is deprived and predominantly black. Now Thomas is back with a follow-up, On the Come Up. “So I hold that over his head,” she says, and giggles. It does feel like a dream I’m going to wake up from.” Her agent now is one of the 150-plus who turned down her first book. “Oh, it’s definitely surreal,” says the 31-year-old Thomas, on the phone from Jackson. Last year, a film adaptation was released, which has been a critical and commercial success. It has now sold more than 2m copies globally. It was a hit here too, and named overall winner of the 2018 Waterstones children’s book prize. THUG, published in early 2017, went straight into the bestseller chart in the US and stayed there for a year. The story speeds up now: the novel became The Hate U Give ( THUG), a YA sensation about a 16-year-old girl called Starr who witnesses her friend Khalil being shot by the police and turns to activism. Thomas’s break came when she cold-contacted a literary agent who was doing a Twitter Q&A. “Yeah, I had more than 150 rejections for that one,” says Thomas matter-of-factly. She had previously written a children’s book, but hadn’t had any interest from agents. At nights – and during quiet periods in the day, she furtively admits – she worked on a young adult novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. Really not very long ago, Angie Thomas was a secretary to a bishop at a megachurch in Jackson, Mississippi. For Thomas, this was why Tupac's lyric was the perfect title for her novel.I n book publishing, it seems, they still do fairytales. In turn, this makes them easy fodder for more racism and oppression, which completes the cycle. Because they lack the tools and ability to better themselves, they turn to the methods and people they know are available. As Maverick explains to Starr, the racism that so many people in Garden Heights receive - whether that's in the form of being abused by police or not being able to find solid career opportunities - results in them resorting to drug dealing and gangs. This is perfectly encapsulated by most of the people living in Garden Heights. The phrase is actually an acronym for "The Hate U Gave Little Infants F*cks Everybody," which, according to the rapper, means, "What you feed us as seeds, grows and blows up in your face." It's his concept of "THUG LIFE" that becomes an important motif in the book while also providing the title. It's no surprise that Thomas drew inspiration for the book's title from Tupac Shakur, a rapper well known for music that focuses on the hardship of racism, social oppression, and life in poor communities.
One of the prevalent themes of the book is how the oppressive systems that keep minorities from getting ahead feed into the cycle of crime, violence, and poverty that dominates poor communities. "I found myself more angry and more frustrated and more hurt," she admitted.
Though Thomas initially put the book aside because it was emotionally draining, she decided to expand the story into a novel after the deaths of several more black lives at the hands of police officers. The Hate U Give Film Is a Faithful Retelling of the Novel With a Few Key Differences