Children's writers often conjure up imaginary worlds in their fiction; and making those worlds convincing is no easy job. Perhaps there's one thing that's harder, though -- writing a compelling story that makes us think about our own world.
Here's one that takes on this challenge -- and succeeds. It creates a fictional world, but one that's eerily familiar, too. It reminds you of a painful period in history, not so long ago, during which the system of apartheid was practiced in South Africa. Under apartheid, the government segregated people based on the colors of their skin, and black people were treated as inferior to white people. What gives this tale its punch, though, is that it shows us what the world might have been like had the power equation been reversed. Here, people are either white Noughts or dark-skinned Crosses -- but it's the Crosses who wield the power.
Fifteen-year-old Callum McGregor is a poor Nought; his closest friend, Sephy Hadley, is a wealthy Cross. Their friendship is free of these divides until Callum gets an opportunity to study at Sephy's privileged school for Crosses. The Cross students give a hostile welcome to their Nought classmate -- just as happened in the late '50s in the United States and as recently as the '90s in South Africa when joint schooling for blacks and whites was violently opposed. By creating an alternative reality in which dark-skinned people are dominant, the book challenges our assumptions about blacks and whites, forcing us to look at racism in a new way.