I love characters who refuse to fit into neat boxes, who challenge the reader throughout their interactions. I do feel a bit sad now it's over though, I love this series so much I just want more and more and more, maybe that's why I put off reading it for so long, I didn't want it to end. 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.

She was the original character and it would have been nice to find out how her life was turning out and if she was happy. It is very encouraging that Blackman's series of books has been so successful and is widely read and made available in UK schools – as it quite rightly should continue to be. Last in the dystopian series set in an alternative Britain in which a 360 degree turnaround focuses light from a different angle on racism, with the setting an alternative history in which Crosses, black people, have always been the dominant civilising force, with white people as former slaves only emancipated fifty years before the timeline of the story.He was incredibly realistic though, just the sort of person you can see getting caught up in the events of ‘Double Cross’. Unfortunately, I didn't find that to be quite enough to hang the novel on, and my attention drifted between annoyance at the stupid choices one of the characters made, and impatience with the pace of the resolution. She knows about terrible mistakes, and violence and revenge, and the fierce divide between Noughts and Crosses.

I 100% recommend checking out this series which starts with the first book, Noughts and Crosses, and if you end up enjoying them enough to reach this book in the series, I'd recommend stopping there and giving this book a miss. Also if you're reading this review after having already read the previous three books in this series and you want to read this as it seems a few things from there may be resolved in this one, they aren't. I have wanted there to be a further book in the Noughts and Crosses saga since I finished Checkmate. There were a few moments in all of the books which I did not particularly enjoy, I did not like Sephy at all in book one but as the series progressed I grew to like her, you see her growing up, changing, learning to love herself. In 2008 she received an OBE for her services to children's literature, and between 2013 and 2015 she was the Children's Laureate.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. It’s such a shame because the original premise so was stellar, I think as a standalone Noughts and Crosses with a bit more work could’ve been amazing. But back to this book, in all seriousness it probably is a lot better than the rating I've given it, and as part of an overall series it is worthwhile piece of the narrative.

I give it a full 5 stars for the happy ending at the end, making all our tears throughout the series change into smiles. I bought this book as soon as it came out, but I never got round to it, it's been sitting on my shelf staring at me and I've been aching to read it so I finally made myself sit down with it. It didn’t need to be tagged on to a series, it’s so relevant to the youth of today and it hits hard. Blackman gets people, especially young adults, in all their tentativeness, determination and energy. Malorie Blackman also wrote a short story entitled An Eye for an Eye for a previous world book day, and many versions of Noughts and Crosses come with this story at the end: if you get a version with this in, the story will be a lot clearer!I hint at the was only because I first read her books, including the first three in this series when I was teenager (way way back) but I can't seem to get back into them as an adult. I mean ruins because it didn’t have to be, this book could have stood up by itself and been counted. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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 Book Award. But in the early stages of 'Double Cross' I began to have a small feeling of doubt, could he have survived, somehow I couldn't completely put it past him.

This is a highly intelligent thriller with important things to say, and once again the distance between Blackman's imagined world and present-day inner city is beautifully judged. She was the only character that didn’t feel like she had a dark secret or hidden intentions and I liked that.Blackman portrays an engagingly vulnerable, multifaceted character in Tobey, who narrates the majority of the book, and through him creates for her readers profound moral and ethical dilemmas.