Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The past colours the present as Sephy gives birth, alone, to her daughter, her baby's father, Callum, having been hanged for terrorism. And while Sephy struggles to face an uncertain future, Callum's brother Jude broods on the past until, finally, his actions draw Sephy into his world once again and she is forced to take sidesa A stunning and powerful novel in which truth and justice are no longer black and white issues but are coloured by revenge, loyalty, atonement and guilt. Unputdownable, Knife Edge will confirm Malorie Blackman's status as one of today's top authors for young readers.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Knife Edge, the follow-up to Malorie Blackman's Naughts & Crosses, finds Sephy, a member of the ruling dark-skinned Crosses, pregnant with the baby of Callum, a now-dead, white-skinned naught. Seeking revenge for his brother's death, Jude plots to kill Sephy, but when he finds himself in terrible danger, she may be the only one who can save him. (S&S, $16.99 368p ages 14-up ISBN 9781-4169-0018-4; July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 9 Up-In this sequel to Naughts and Crosses (S & S, 2005), Persephone (Sephy) Hadley, now an 18-year-old single parent, is raising her biracial daughter in a sharply divided alternate England, where black Crosses suppress the white Naughts. She faces pressure from both her less-than-understanding Cross family and her disintegrating Naught family, and everyone in between. When her brother-in-law's violent behavior leads to murder, Sephy provides a false alibi to save Jude, but doing so irreparably damages other lives. Second in Blackman's trilogy, this work presents similar themes with the same lack of subtlety that dominated the first work; Blackman's approach to communicating racism is to change instances of black disenfranchisement to white. The most popular white rocker is actually black; white performers must use the back doors to enter venues; popular desserts have racist names. Such a heavy hand leaves readers alienated from the dark history of racism. Jude and Sephy dominate the narrative, though occasionally other voices are included. Stiff language and murky motivation hamper the thin characters from generating emotional suspense. Jacqueline Woodson's If You Come Softly (Putnam, 1998) and Trudy B. Krisher's Spite Fences (Random, 1994) address similar issues, but with rich characters and taut feeling. Strictly for libraries in which the first book is in high demand.-Chris Shoemaker, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

"When readers left Sephy in Naughts and Crosses (2005), the black, privileged teen was pregnant by her minority white boyfriend, Callum, who had just been hanged for being part of the Liberation Militia. The book picks up with Sephy, a few months from delivering her daughter, about to be murdered by Jude, Callum's radical, bitter brother. Told in alternating voices Sephy, her sister and mother, Jude, his mother this is a disturbing second installment in the Black & White trilogy. As in the previous book, the writing is keenly incisive, though more so, in this case, when looking at interpersonal rather than race relations. But Blackman goes to some very dark places, especially in the shocking ending. Without the love of Sephy and Callum that leavened the first book (and even that is tarnished here), this is almost unrelentingly downbeat. Still, readers who have come this far with the Naughts and Crosses and their segregated society will want to see how the trilogy is resolved and whether hope, somehow, some way, manages to emerge."--"Cooper, Ilene" Copyright 2007 Booklist

Horn Book Review

(High School) The sequel to Blackman's Naughts & Crosses (rev. 7/05) revisits the racist society in which white people (naughts) were once the slaves of blacks (Crosses). Cross Sephy Hadley has just given birth to a mixed-race child, whose father, naught Liberation Militia activist Callum McGregor, was executed at the end of the first book. Meanwhile, Callum's vindictive brother Jude eludes authorities while attempting to regain favor with the Liberation Militia. Rather unbelievably, Jude begins to fall in love with a Cross owner of an integrated salon; when Cara gets too close, Jude snaps and beats her so brutally that she dies a few days later. The police eventually arrest him, but his nemesis Sephy decides to lie to authorities to give him an alibi, which leads to his acquittal. The plot heats up further when Jude assures the murder of another L.M. member who betrayed him both personally and professionally, while he implicates Sephy in Cara's murder. The writing here is trite (""I turned my stricken gaze to my sister in disbelief"") and the characters are inconsistently drawn, vacillating inexplicably between extremes. Despite these weaknesses, Blackman's story continues to be of interest because of its provocative re-visioning of contemporary social issues. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

Sephy is alone and pregnant living in an apartheid state. Her own father had her light-skinned lover Callum executed, and she's despised by Callum's brother Jude. In this racist society, where black-skinned Crosses subject white-skinned naughts to crushing racial prejudice, Sephy stands in a dangerous middle ground. She wants to raise her child in peace, but both naughts and Crosses condemn her, and Jude wants to exact revenge. Both Sephy and Jude cross race borders in their quests, Sephy joining a naught rock band and Jude romancing a liberal-minded Cross woman. As in Black and White (2005), the ideological message is heavy handed, somewhat shallow and inconsistent: Mixed-race children are either extremely rare, or common only on society's margins; naughts claim a unique vernacular which is never used in the text; a Cross woman is portrayed as remarkably kind and intelligent with no exploration of how wealth and privilege make such traits easier to come by. The personal tragedies of Sephy and Jude's lives in a broken world, however, are rich and genuine. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.