KIDS’ BOOK OF THE WEEK

ENDGAME

By Malorie Blackman, Penguin,

£14.99 (ebook £9.99) ★★★II If you were born in the late Eighties/ early Nineties, you likely grew up with the protagonists of Malorie Blackman’s gripping, shimmering, groundbreaking YA novel, Noughts & Crosses.

In 2001, Sephy and Callum entered our lives, bringing with them a familiar – but inverted – world of trauma and racial inequality, where Noughts (lightskinned people) are treated as less than Crosses (dark-skinned people).

Love, strength and family abound and now, 20 years on, Blackman ties up their stories in the series’ last instalment, Endgame, but it’s not as satisfying a finale as hoped. It picks up where 2019’s Crossfire left off with a kidnapping, a murder and an impending court case, but the pace is sluggish. Sephy is back to set wrongs right, while her daughter Callie Rose tussles with her ex Tobey. And Sephy’s son Troy, trapped in a windowless cell, fights for survival, all while criminal gangs vie for power.

The premise is tense, but too much focus goes on characters making plans, rather than actually doing something in the face of all this drama.