From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up—In this sequel to
Naughts and Crosses (S & S, 2005), Persephone (Sephy) Hadley, now an 18-year-old single parent, is raising her biracial daughter in a sharply divided alternate England, where black Crosses suppress the white Naughts. She faces pressure from both her less-than-understanding Cross family and her disintegrating Naught family, and everyone in between. When her brother-in-law's violent behavior leads to murder, Sephy provides a false alibi to save Jude, but doing so irreparably damages other lives. Second in Blackman's trilogy, this work presents similar themes with the same lack of subtlety that dominated the first work; Blackman's approach to communicating racism is to change instances of black disenfranchisement to white. The most popular white rocker is actually black; white performers must use the back doors to enter venues; popular desserts have racist names. Such a heavy hand leaves readers alienated from the dark history of racism. Jude and Sephy dominate the narrative, though occasionally other voices are included. Stiff language and murky motivation hamper the thin characters from generating emotional suspense. Jacqueline Woodson's
If You Come Softly(Putnam, 1998) and Trudy B. Krisher's
Spite Fences (Random, 1994) address similar issues, but with rich characters and taut feeling. Strictly for libraries in which the first book is in high demand.—
Chris Shoemaker, New York Public Library Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
When readers left Sephy in Naughts and Crosses (2005), the black, privileged teen was pregnant by her minority white boyfriend, Callum, who had just been hanged for being part of the Liberation Militia. The book picks up with Sephy, a few months from delivering her daughter, about to be murdered by Jude, Callum's radical, bitter brother. Told in alternating voices—Sephy, her sister and mother, Jude, his mother—this is a disturbing second installment in the Black & White trilogy. As in the previous book, the writing is keenly incisive, though more so, in this case, when looking at interpersonal rather than race relations. But Blackman goes to some very dark places, especially in the shocking ending. Without the love of Sephy and Callum that leavened the first book (and even that is tarnished here), this is almost unrelentingly downbeat. Still, readers who have come this far with the Naughts and Crosses and their segregated society will want to see how the trilogy is resolved—and whether hope, somehow, some way, manages to emerge. Cooper, Ilene
