S2 Book Talks

November's  S2 book talk is all about the powerful Noughts and Crosses series by Malorie Blackman. The first novel in this acclaimed series, of which there are now six, was written nearly two decades ago. 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 book challenged perceptions of race in a way that hadn’t been done for a Young Adult audience before.

“When I came to Noughts and Crosses,” says Blackman, “what I found really interesting was some of the assumptions that my white friends had about black people etcetera,” says Blackman. And so, she thought: “Now how do I turn it on its head?”

“I didn’t read a book that featured a black protagonist until I was 21,” she says. It was a copy of The Color Purple by Alice Walker that she had picked up at an independent Black bookshop in Islington. Growing up in Clapham, south London, Blackman “lived down my local” (library, not pub). But as a young girl, she didn’t see herself in stories, which sounds painful to remember how. “I knew that the world that I absolutely adored, the world of literature, I was invisible in and excluded from,” she says, adding: “It’s gotten better. We’re not there yet though.”