Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Rating: 3 stars

Synopsis: Callum is a Nought - an inferior white citizen in a society controlled by the black crosses.

Sephy is a Cross - and the daughter of one of the most powerful, ruthless men in the country.

In their hostile, violent world, Noughts and Crosses simply don't mix. But when Sephy and Callum's friendship grows into passionate love, their're determined to find a way to be together.

My Review - I wasn't sure what rating to give this book. I did enjoy reading it overall and I thought the issues dealt with were really well done. BUT there were quite a few things that I didn't enjoy about the book and these things lowered the rating for me.

We'll start with the negatives. I hated Sephy. Seriously hated her. She's younger than Callum by a few months yet she acts like it's a few years. Callum explains why they can't act like friends at school (for obvious reasons) yet she does it anyway and gets mad when Callum doesn't help. She does kind of develop by the end of the book but for the majority of the book I couldn't connect to her character at all and just wanted to slap some sense into her.

The star-crossed lovers element also didn't work for me. The romance seemed to be thrown in every so often and, because of this, I couldn't really imagine the relationship between the characters. One of the final 'twists' in the book also felt like it had just been thrown in to try and make things more interesting and I didn't really invest in it - the 'twist' in question has been a little overdone in my opinion and it really didn't work here.

I think the book would have been better if it had focused more on the story between the two mothers that we see in the prologue - I thought the book would revolve around that incident but instead, it's explained in the prologue and then left alone, so I didn't really understand the relevance of having X amount of pages dedicated to it at the start because it didn't really help the book much, other than to show why Callum and Sephy aren't allowed to be together and even then, I felt it didn't really do that.

On the positive side, I did like how the elements of racial prejudice was dealt with in this book; it added a really unique twist to the whole plot. I would have liked the story to include more details on the prejudice because by the time I'd finished the book I'd forgotten that one character was white and one wasn't. But, apart from that, the issues the book dealt were what really made the book interesting and, by the authors note at the start, the issues were really personal to the author and you could tell she felt strongly about the issues.

I'd heard a lot of amazing things about this book so I was disappointed overall by what I found. It's an OK book but I won't be buying the rest in the series. I thought the issues that were dealt with were really good but overall, the book lacked the spark between the characters and the plot. For me, dystopian novels such as Divergent and the Hunger Games are 10,000 times better and more entertaining. Sorry Malorie Blackman - but this just wasn't for me.

I'd really love to hear what you think about this book, or any of the books that I review, or to recommend books to read!

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