Her dystopian world is sufficiently close to ours for teenage readers to draw many disturbing parallels with contemporary urban culture, but happily resolution is offered through the ultimate indestructibility of true loyalty and love. Purely because it doesn’t feel like it belongs, it doesn’t feel like it’s meant to be in that world. Double Cross retains the themes of racism in its newly post-apartheid world of Noughts and Crosses but it also brings in a new edge. Putting it in an alternative reality is like taking something that’s meant to cause damage and wrapping it in bubble wrap. I did enjoy the story but I feel it would have been better as a stand alone and not associated with the series.

won the Young Telegraph/Gimme 5 Award - Malorie is the only author to have won this award twice - while Hacker also won the WH Smith Mind-Boggling Books Award in 1994. I mean ruins because it didn’t have to be, this book could have stood up by itself and been counted.Not that her writing is inaccessible to adults, just for me it was harder to go back to the point where I left off in this continuing story. I wasn't too sure whether I actually liked this book because up until 3/4 of the way through, the events were dramatic but you didn't necessarily need to read the book. Noughts and Crosses has been dramatised as a 6-part TV series which was first shown on BBC TV in March 2020, as well as dramatised twice as a theatre play and produced as a radio drama for BBC Radio 4.

In 2005 she was honoured with the Eleanor Farjeon Award in recognition of her contribution to children’s books, and in 2008 she received an OBE for her services to children’s literature. There is also no alternating voices with each chapter, which I thought was a shame as the format had worked so well in the previous books.Most of this book is from Toby's persective as you see him stuggling to accept that he's still seen as lower class and has no money for the things he wants (like college) because of it. That book (Checkmate) wraps up the story that began in Noughts and Crosses and this books is just another random character's story. In 2005, Malorie was honoured with the Eleanor Farjeon Award in recognition of her distinguished contribution to the world of children's books.