Growing up dual heritage in a world where bitter prejudice divides Noughts and Crosses has meant she's an outsider wherever she turns.Įnter Jude McGregor. But the world hasn't changed quickly enough for their daughter, Callie Rose. Sixteen years have passed since Sephy Hadley first met Callum McGregor - and the hate that divided them turned to hope. And he is determined to force her to take sides, and destroy her life. Sephy Hadley - a Cross, supposedly powerful and privileged - has bound herself forever to her nought lover Callum McGregor's family.īut Jude McGregor blames Sephy for all the tragedies his family has suffered. Two families have been shattered by the divided and violent society they live in. Where there has been love, now there is hate. Then - in spite of a world that is fiercely against them - these star-crossed lovers choose each other.īut this is love story that will lead both of them into terrible danger. Noughts and Crosses are fated to be bitter enemies - love is out of the question. They've been friends since they were children, and they both know that's as far as it can ever go. But she's lonely, and burns with injustice at the world she sees around her.Ĭallum is a nought: he's considered to be less than nothing - a blanker, there to serve Crosses - but he dreams of a better life.
The book challenged perceptions of race in a way that hadn’t been done for a YA audience before.Sephy is a Cross: she lives a life of privilege and power. Its story of star-crossed lovers though – a Romeo and Juliet-type story set in an alternative contemporary world in which Black people had been the colonisers and were now the ruling class dominant over white people – hasn’t aged.
The first novel of Blackman’s acclaimed series, of which there are now six, was written nearly two decades ago. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman is one of those books for me. Sometimes that book will be a critically acclaimed classic like Jane Eyre or Crime and Punishment and often it will be something that you read in childhood – less lofty but equally powerful. It consumes your every waking thought, burying itself so deep into your psyche that years later, on occasion, it will still emit some stray spark of memory. Once in a while, a book comes along that lingers long after a spine is first cracked.
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