Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give is extremely relevant to current events in the United States. In the story, Starr Carter is a black teenage girl who attends a high school with a mostly white student body but lives in poor, mostly black neighborhood. When her friend Khalil, a black boy her age, is shot by the police for seemingly no reason, her world is turned upside down. The author actually started her work on the story in response to real-life events in the year 2009, when an young, unarmed black man named Oscar Grant was shot by a white police officer after already having been restrained. 

This book is undeniably Black Lives Matter-centered. The Black Lives Matter movement is one that has recently swept the world of activism in the US, and was started up mainly in response to the events surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012 (Martin was not shot by a member of police, but by George Zimmerman, who followed and shot the unarmed black teenager while he was walking home one night). You may have also heard of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, who were all victims of police shootings and brutality in the past few years. Angie Thomas takes the time in her book to point out that these shootings are intrinsically part of a cycle of violence, poverty, and racial prejudice that many black communities and individuals in the US face. If you research this or listen to the news, you will see that shootings like this happen frequently in the US.