The Themes Of Conflicts In Hate List By Jennifer Brown

Imagine, one day you are sitting in the commons at school talking to your friends when all of a sudden you hear a “BANG, BANG.” Then you hear and see a bunch of kids running, screaming, and trying to hide. What would you do? What would you be feeling? Well, this is what happens in the book Hate List by Jennifer Brown. Hate List is about a sixteen-year-old girl named Valerie Leftman, whose boyfriend Nick started school shooting at the end of their junior year. Valerie struggles to cope with the events of the shooting and trying to get herself back into High School. She has to deal with the judgement of other people, how to get over what happened, and how to move on. The theme of this novel is hatred, and it is important because it shows that …show more content…
“I kept the TV tuned to Food Network or some other channel that was nott showing coverage of the shooting. But at night, my intense curiosity won over and I would watch the news, my heart sometimes pounding in my chest as I tried to piece together who had lived, who had died, and how the school was going on about its business” (Brown 160-161). This quote shows that even though throughout most of the book Valerie is a thoughtful person. She does not want other people to know that she is curious about what happened the day of the shooting. So she watched the TV to try and figure it out. This is an example of how Valerie faces mental conflict because of the shooting. “A police cruiser was sitting in the driveway when I got home, Dad’s car parked behind it and a battered red jeep behind it. A feeling of dread washed over me. I trudged up the driveway and let myself in the house” (Brown 352). Valerie, like most of us, tends to do things without thinking how it will affect the people around her. In the book she decides she wants to go visit her boyfriend, Nick’s, grave without telling her mom and dad were she is going or that she even left. This causes them to freak out of course and they end up calling the police because they think she ran away. Valerie did not think clearly she thought that they would trust her and not think she ran away. This quote shows how Valerie continues to struggle mentally after the …show more content…
“The real pain did not start until the next day, after the surgery, after my skin and nerves and muscles had a day to get used to the idea that something had forever changed. I cried a lot during those first two days, and most of my crying was about wanting something to make the pain go away” (Brown 140). Throughout the whole book, Valerie had to deal with a lot of negative emotions. She got shot in the knee by her boyfriend, so she had that pain. She also felt pain emotionally from the disaster of the shooting. This is an example of how Valerie has to deal with her emotional conflicts. “I hid the anger that was welling inside me. Anger at my parents for not being there for me. Anger at Nick for being dead. Anger at the people in the school who tormented Nick. Anger at myself for not seeing this coming. I learned to tamp down the anger, to force it to the back of my mind, hoping that it would just fizzle out, go away. I learned to pretend it was already gone” (Brown 182). Valerie is the type of girl who likes to hold her feelings and emotions in instead of letting other people help her or letting them see what she is really feeling. She tends to hold all her anger in until she just explodes. This quote shows how Valerie deals with her emotions and how she is not always the best at showing them. Throughout the book Valerie has to deal with a lot of emotional conflicts. These are a few examples of her struggles