Quotes of the Day

As the boundaries of acceptable public speech and behavior are pushed ever outward (nice job, Janet and Justin), it gets harder all the time to find the line between frankness and prurience — especially in young-adult literature. British novelist Melvin Burgess was clearly astride it last year with Doing It, an explicit (not to mention popular) story of schoolboy lust that he defended as realistic but many denounced as misogynistic pornography. And Burgess has plenty of company; in fact, with teen-fiction shelves groaning under the weight of cautionary tales about sex, drugs, divorce or delinquency, it's little wonder many young readers scurry off to the fantasy section instead. But one writer of teen fiction has proven herself both frank and frankly worth reading. Malorie Blackman's 2001 best seller Noughts and Crosses transcended the kid-lit clichés even as it staked out disputed new turf for youth fiction. Its 13-year-old black hero, Sephy, starts out French-kissing her 15-year-old white boyfriend, Callum; encounters racism, alcoholism, depression and suicide; and ends up pregnant and alone when Callum is hanged for terrorism. In Blackman's sequel, Knife Edge (Doubleday; 364 pages), published this month, things take a turn for the worse.

What really caught the imagination of young readers in Noughts and Crosses — and made Blackman the only black writer in the BBC's recent poll of Britain's 100 favorite books — was a simple, profoundly disconcerting, plot twist. In Sephy and Callum's world, it's the black people, (known as crosses), who have the power, money and education, while whites (the noughts) have menial jobs, few rights and even fewer opportunities. Blacks routinely diss whites as "blankers" and are known as "daggers" in return. It's a way of life that most crosses want to defend; the noughts are itching for change and some are willing to kill and die for it.

All 49 of Blackman's books before Noughts and Crosses have had a black kid as their hero, but until 2001 she had resisted publishers' pressure to write about racism. "As if that was the only thing I could really write about," says Blackman, a 42-year-old Londoner and former database manager at Reuters. "It used to drive me nuts." When she relented and decided to tackle it through slavery, "My black friends said, 'Why do you want to do that? It's so painful,' and my white friends said, 'Why do you want to do that? It was hundreds of years ago.'"

So instead Blackman decided to turn black history on its head, inventing a country that harks back to the civil rights movement in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa, with flagrant police brutality, pitched battles over integrated education and segregated health services. But the novel's ID cards, casual racial abuse and media stereotyping are topical in Britain today. "Especially with the rhetoric you get about asylum seekers," says Blackman.

In seeking to get beneath the skin of terrorism, she is confronting an issue as raw as race. Although Noughts and Crosses was written before Sept. 11, the interest of U.S. publishers disappeared soon after that day. "They got cold feet," says Blackman. Nonetheless, in Knife Edge, the author plunges deeper still into the mindset of a terrorist. Callum's brother, Jude, a die-hard cell leader with the noughts' Liberation Militia, finds himself falling for a woman, a cross he has befriended in order to rob. Because he understands hatred better than his heart and his mind, hatred wins — sickeningly: "She smiled at me. Total trust, love and devotion. It was too much. I was dying in it. I clenched my fists and hit her." Blackman is unapologetic: "I want the reader to empathize and to understand that maybe this is the only avenue that's left open to him and that he switches himself off from what he's doing."

As literature, Knife Edge is a bit of a letdown, sagging with serial indignities where Noughts and Crosses was taut with sheer indignation. For example, Sephy's attempt to cut it as a singer in the noughts' underground music scene feels peripheral (and lyrically, she's no Eminem). But Blackman promises to end her bleak trilogy next year on a note of hope. What a nice, old-fashioned idea — especially for kid lit.

• MICHAEL BRUNTON
• With Knife Edge, writer Malorie Blackman tests the outer limits of kid lit