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Noughts and Crosses the audio book

Malorie Blackman is a prolific writer with great incite. I had been trying to coax her on my sons for years. It was only after I listened to Noughts and Crosses (what they call Tic Tac Toe in England), that I realized that she is largely a young adult writer. They were too young and too male. Although, it was only ever Pig-Heart Boy that I was trying to get them to read.
Let me begin by saying that I have not made as many unnecessary car journeys as I have done in the past two weeks, in order to listen to this audio CD in my car. Only when I was doing research into Ms Blackman that I found out, to my great relief, that it is the first in a trilogy. I can only imagine that Malorie was as in love with her characters as I was and just couldn't let them go.
    Noughts and Crosses is a clever role reversal book. It is about a world run by black people where whites are second class citizens, as blacks were in apartheid run South Africa. The story is narrated by Sephy (Nina Sosanya) who is a privileged daughter of a politician and Callum (Nigel Greaves) a nought, surrounded by poverty and strife. The story alternates between the two first person narrators, telling the story of their interwoven lives.
    The shocking thing for me was that evening in an audio book, where Callum sounds just like a white South African, I still had trouble keeping him white in my mind's eye. I am a victim of a racist society. I would not consider myself a racist and yet, deep inside I am clearly and profoundly effected by it. I suppose we all are. Blackman throws in little nuggets such as only brown plasters available, someone asking a white person what he name means.
    My eleven year old son noticed how engrossed I was in the story and he picked up the book and tore threw it. He loved it and began to listen to the story with me when we were in the car alone. I saw him put his hands over his ears during a sex scene. There are only two but they are passionate and I suppose, unnecessary to him. That is not to say, they were unnecessary to the plot. Far from it.
    On balance, I think this book, listened to or read, is suitable for 14 year olds and up. It is very well read, exciting, un-put-downable.

Gatty's Tale by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Some books are better left on the page. Gatty's Tale is one of them. Kevin Crossley-Holland has fulfilled his dream of writing a story of a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1203 by nine people, including Gatty. Gatty is a character from the King Arthur Legends. He has plumped her up into a main character and she becomes the unlikely heroine of this story.
The six of drove to Paris and back earlier this month listening to Gatty's Tale. By the end we felt as if we had been to Jerusalem and back. The reader, Claudia Renton, might have been at fault. She had to take on many different English, Welsh and foreign accents. It was a difficult job and sometimes some of the characters became confused. And in the case of Lady Gwyneth, the sponsor of the trip, her way of speaking was annoying.
    Perhaps the fact that this book only had a wisp of a subplot also added to the tedium of it. The six CD's last for eight hours.This is a book for serious young teenage girls. The odd boy might like it too. But we were a car made up of four boys and two girls (the two girls being me and my seven year old daughter). But to our credit, we listened to the end. We laughed, we cried and we spoke about the story when we were out of the car and bouncing around Paris. But unlike Ark Angel and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, we frequently turned it off for breaks.
To sum up, read it, don't listen to it and don't read it out loud to your kids.