Whilst, I can appreciate that the beauty industry has come a long way, this book based on the structural racism within our current society, shows just how much race plays a part in our everyday life. I wanted a black person on the cover, but plots that had nothing to do with race per se’ (Amanda Craig, The Times, 31 January 2004). Sephy said in KnifeEdge that she felt like 'a little kid on a knife edge', and that line perfectly sums up how Sephy was in KnifeEdge. I could go on and on about ‘ double consciousness’ and what that means for Black people but honestly that’s an essay for another day. I still remember that feeling, and I wanted to explore that idea [that] if something happens to you that’s really hurtful and hateful, do you let it change your life, and do you let it change the sort of person you become […] you don’t have to let bad things turn you into a bad person.

I literally flew through this book in one sitting because I didn't want to put it down till I finished it. I know that the ending of book 1 hit her hard (Me too Sephy, me too) but that is no excuse to lose whatever it was that made her stand up against the world and scream eff you all. Although, we know how volatile and angry Jude was from book one, here we got to see it up close and personal.I watched as they all tried to negotiate their way up to the top of the star and back down again, each team still holding hands. Sephy recognized one of the men in the Liberation Militia as working for her father, Andrew Dawn and now Jude is looking for a way to get him found out and avenge his brother. As with the first book, there is a rather bitty structure where short section follows short section, each in an alternating viewpoint.

The characters complexity is just fantastic and I even felt pity for the worst characters as my opinions of the characters kept altering. The side characters are well developed which immediately told me that this book would deserve a very high rating.The style is simple and direct, but the ramifications of what it describes are thought out in devastating detail. The story is completely unpredictable and highlights so much unjust that still exists in our own society and the forgotten aspects of racial inequality. Pig-Heart Boy is the story of a young boy, Cameron, who will die if he does not receive a heart transplant. The rest of the story is partly about the difficulties Sephy faces while she is living with Meggie and facing increasing discrimination and hatred from the Noughts in the neighbourhood, which becomes worse after she briefly becomes the lead singer in a Nought band, through a contact made with the woman who was in the next bed in the maternity ward.

Recent books include Noble Conflict (2013), a thriller set in a post-revolutionary utopia; Chasing the Stars (2017), a re-telling of Othello set in space, which was shortlisted for the YA Book Prize; and Blueblood (2020), a re-telling of the Bluebeard fairy tale. But, Knife Edge is a classic example of a book that doesn’t suffer from SBS and is equally good in it’s own right. Malorie Blackman m'a emportée dans toutes ces émotions profondes, sombres, brutales, avec une telle simplicité.But when he's offered the chance to earn some extra money, how much could it hurt to just this once say 'yes'? In March 2007, Blackman edited Unheard Voices, ananthology of stories and poems to Commemorate the bicentenary anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. What Malorie Blackman has always done so brilliantly is put the minority front and centre, both in society and politics.

Learning to see the human side of Jude was the saving grace of this book, but by the halfway point, his story was over, and I lost a reason to finish the book. One is her mother, with whom she has a reconciliation now that her mother has separated from her father and has cut out the drinking. Or how Nought women get implants to make their lips fuller or spend longer in sunbeds to make themselves darker.

was sparked off by something that happened to me when I was a child, being accused of something that I didn’t do. I mean he’s not the nicest boy and he was always on his way to Jerktown and I want to know why she refuses to see that.