A thought provoking read that challenges those who agree with the caricatures of the African American men and women who are unarmed and killed so frequently by police to look beyond the headlines to the people they were. This is a story of Starr, a sixteen-year-old girl, who is in a car with her 18-year-old friend Khalil , who is stopped by the police and shot. The book is about what her life is like from that moment on. And who her friend Khalil truly was. 
 Her fears, the fears of so many African Americans these days, are deeply explored and the author makes every attempt at helping someone who would not understand those fears realize they are legitimate. Even as you read the desperate and unwinnable situation play out you hope that maybe this story is different. You hope the way we hope again and again that justice prevails. Starr speaks with a voice of someone wiser than herself and says exactly the right things when it gets tough, when defending her deceased friend, when speaking to judges and investigators and people who daily decide how to dispense "justice", about what transpired that night and yet the outcome is still the same. 
 Starr is a character who lives on the line between poverty and middle class making her accessible to everyone. The exploration of race relations as she interacts with her White friends and her Black friends is so well written, raw and often uncomfortable. Its the point of this book. To challenge the reader to think analytically of the dozens of lives that are taken by police and who so many excuse because they believe that a "thug" is less than human. Less that worthy of a fair trial. Less than worthy of life. An amazing book that hopes for hope, a hope that someday everyone will agree that Black lives matter.