Synthesis Page

Hate List

by

Jennifer Brown

Question: How does this book help you to think about social issues you care about or causes you are committed to?

Bullying- This is the main problem of this book. All the the people who made hateful remarks to either Valerie or Nick caused the shooting to happen. In this book and in the real world, bullying causes deaths that could be prevented by just telling a teacher or caring for one another. Overtime, bullying starts to take a negative effect on people and it becomes so serious that they start to think to the extreme. For example, on page 100 in the text Nick says, “ Yeah. You’re right. But I could do it. I could totally blow those people up. It just wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.’ We’d both laughed.” This quote is very powerful because it shows how sick he was and what the bullies had done to him. If someone would have addressed the situation, he would’ve received help and lives could have been saved. That is why in real life we have to try our hardest to stop bullying and we can prevent the deaths of kids across the world.

Underage Drinking- I think that the author was trying to prove a point when coming up with the character that Nick is. She made a character that does horrible things in his life to prove that you have nothing to gain from it. This is compelling to me because it also relates to the topic of peer pressure. Nick drinks and smokes weed and then convinces Valerie to do the same. This causes them to make despicable decisions which costs the lives of people in the school. Doing drugs and drinking can mess with your brain to cause you to be educationally challenged, especially at a young age. In the real world, this can easily be prevented if parents pay attention to what there children are doing and who they are hanging out with.

Gun Control- This is a world wide problem because governments cannot keep guns out of the wrong peoples hands. A clear example is Nick, who shot up his school with a gun that he got from a friend. His “friend” shouldn’t have even had a gun in the first place. If Valerie’s parents had watched who she was hanging out with, than the list could have been stopped. If governments worked a lot harder to ban guns on the streets, than lives could have been saved.

Overall, I believe that we as a society should be using books like these to help improve our communities by taking all the wrongs in the book and make them rights in the real world. For example taking guns off of the streets could definitely save insane amounts of lives over the course of a year. Yet we are still struggling to take charge and that is why this book should be used as an example to help society to fix its problems