KNIFE EDGE

Sephy is alone and pregnant living in an apartheid state. Her own father had her light-skinned lover Callum executed, and she’s despised by Callum’s brother Jude. In this racist society, where black-skinned Crosses subject white-skinned naughts to crushing racial prejudice, Sephy stands in a dangerous middle ground. She wants to raise her child in peace, but both naughts and Crosses condemn her, and Jude wants to exact revenge. Both Sephy and Jude cross race borders in their quests, Sephy joining a naught rock band and Jude romancing a liberal-minded Cross woman. As in Black and White (2005), the ideological message is heavy handed, somewhat shallow and inconsistent: Mixed-race children are either extremely rare, or common only on society’s margins; naughts claim a unique vernacular which is never used in the text; a Cross woman is portrayed as remarkably kind and intelligent with no exploration of how wealth and privilege make such traits easier to come by. The personal tragedies of Sephy and Jude’s lives in a broken world, however, are rich and genuine. (Fiction. YA)