It’s 2018. 16-year-old Natalie “Nat” Lennon lives in Dover with her dad and 18-year-old brother Ryan. The family are grief-stricken following the death of Natalie’s mother (who worked supporting refugees) from an aggressive form of cancer. Unable to find regular work, Natalie’s dad is forced to navigate the complicated UK benefits system as he struggles to pay the bills while Ryan is stuck on a zero hours contract. Like her mum, Natalie was a talented and keen swimmer who had a chance to turn professional. Her mum used to support her by taking her training and keeping her motivated, but since her death Natalie’s given up and lost a swimming scholarship as a result. Now she can barely even make it into school some days and although her girlfriend, Mel, is supportive and considerate, Natalie can’t help but feel jealous at the fact that Mel still has a mum who loves her and her family is very well off compared to hers. 18-year-old Samuel “Sammy” Jabir lives with his mother and sister Sophia in Eritrea. The country is under single party, authoritarian control. There are no free newspapers, no opposition and teenagers are routinely conscripted into the army where they are tortured and treated as slaves for as long as the military wants them. Sammy’s father - a journalist - was murdered by the military for the stories he wrote about the regime. Now that same military have taken Sophia to the Sawa training camp and want to conscript Sammy too. Sammy knows that he’ll never survive if he goes so he and his best friend Tesfay Solomon raise $1000, buy forged papers and head for the border with Sudan with a plan to then go on to Europe and Britain, where Sammy has relatives. While Sammy and Tesfay make their dangerous journey, Natalie realises that Ryan is becoming involved with the English Defence League, a far-right, racist organisation that’s protesting in Dover against refugees and immigrants. When Fazel (a student in Nat’s class who’s also a refugee) is viciously beaten in a racist attack, Nat reads more about the plight of refugees and decides that she wants to do something to help them by swimming the Channel to raise money. But even as she trains, her fears that Ryan is falling deeper into hatred slowly morph into fears as to what he is doing to further it. Nat and Sammy find their fates entwined in a way that gives each hope even as the odds against them have never been higher … Manjeet Mann’s YA novel pitches the plight of refugees against increasing anti-refugee sentiment within the UK. It’s told in verse and very well written with Mann effortlessly switching between Sammy and Nat to emphasise their common experiences and emotions. Sammy’s experiences make it a difficult read at times while Mann shows why people are attracted to racism without excusing it. This will be on the 2021 awards lists and it deserves to be. I’m going to say straight up that I am not normally drawn to novels told in verse - partly because when they’re done badly, it’s just painful, but also because they can be very gimmicky. However this book is an example of verse narrative being done really well. Mann pulls off the difficult feat of giving her two main characters distinctive voices and then allowing them to tell their own stories. There are some graphical tricks used to achieve this, e.g. bold text at the end of sections and beginning of sections to show the transition between Nat and Sammy and repetition of lines between sections to show the connection. The verse format means that Mann has to use a pared down style to get the emotion and descriptions across but it is amazing how much she packs in. It’s clever, it flows very well and it kept me turning the pages. Mann makes clear who Sammy and Nat are and what each is going through. In Nat’s case, the pain is primarily emotional as she struggles to process the grief of her mum’s death but also her helplessness at what that death has done to her dad and her brother and how everyone is pulling away from each other. None of this is helped by their precarious financial position thanks to the lack of decent paid work or the fact that their landlord has decided to kick them out of the home they’ve lived in for most of Nat’s life. It gives the scenes where Nat’s dad offers to train her for the Channel swim more poignancy, not least because Mann makes explicit how much of a purpose it gives him while bringing them close together, even as Ryan pulls away more and more. Also well done are the scenes between Nat and Mel. Mann does well in showing how complicated Nat’s emotions are - her inability to express how she feels or what she’s going through as she tries to process her grief, her feelings of inadequacy given Mel’s outgoing nature, confidence and popularity and her envy at everything that Mel has, which in turn feeds into Nat’s guilt that she feels that way. Guilt also feeds into her interactions with Fazel, fed by her nagging worry that Ryan was involved and although the Fazel and Nat scenes are probably the thinnest in the book, I appreciated the fact that Mann makes sure Fazel makes clear he doesn’t need her to be his white saviour. If I am going to nitpick, I’d say that I would have liked a bit more in the scenes between Ryan and Nat, especially towards the end when she and her dad make a critical decision because the emotional fall out, and notably Ryan’s reaction to the consequences, did not ring quite true given everything he has done before. That said, Mann does a very good job of showing the mix of desperation and frustration that makes racist groups like the EDL and how such groups cynically use the people who come to them and abandon them just as quickly. Indeed, the scenes where she shows Nat’s dad’s frustrations at trying to use the benefits system and find a new home for them are very moving, even as the scenes where they go to check out a proposed new development and realise that there’s nothing there for them are heartbreaking. In contrast Sammy’s journey is a harrowing read. Mann does not sugar coat the situation that people face in Eritrea or the dangers, brutality and exploitation that refugees face. There’s a slightly disjointed element to the journey with Sammy and Tesfay going from dangerous, awful situation to dangerous awful situation, sometimes making friends but mostly being exploited by men who view them as a commodity there to make money from and who literally don’t care if they live or die. There are some really difficult scenes to read here, for me the hardest being those in the detention and processing centres - and it’s all the harder because of Sammy’s determination and spirit, which keeps him going on as he tries to get to Britain. There’s a touch of magical realism to the connection between Nat and Sammy, which I didn’t mind in the context of the novel because the way Mann links them emotionally makes it hang together well. I’m not going to spoil the ending, but suffice to say that I very much admire the way Mann brings the story to a close and the choices she makes in it. I think it’s something that will very much stay with the reader for a long time afterwards. I won’t be surprised to see this on the awards lists during 2021 and, frankly, it deserves to be there and is worth a few hours of your time. Review copy from publisher.

The Crossing explores the theme of migration from the dual perspectives of Natalie and Sammy using the overlapping verse narrative to link the two characters' worlds together. This concept of humanity being intertwined and intrinsically linked is adeptly handled by Mann as she lays bare the horrors faced by refugees from their initial beginnings, their journeys and ultimately the racism endured in their supposedly safe new homes. Mann explores the themes so often portrayed in the media with refugee camps in Calais, migrants drowning during failed sea crossings and Nationalistic pride in port cities with an accessibility in form and content to capture the imagination of YA readers. Mann creates a see saw of opposites throughout the book - female/male; gay/straight; rich/poor; motherless/fatherless; Liberal/Nationalist; UK/Europe all pivoting the physical barrier of the English Channel. In some ways all the characters in The Crossing are victims to a greater or lesser extent, whether in terms of birth, locality or ideology. The beauty in this book is the opportunity to empathise with the lives of others and share in the experience of simply being human. Read this book and think about where we have the fortune to be.

I loved Run, Rebel last year so I was really pleased to see another book from Manjeet Mann and I wasn’t disappointed! Books about migration and refugees are increasingly common (and it’s an important issue so I’m all for that), but this felt like it took a really different and multi-faceted approach, in its use of poetry and the dual narrative telling, in the way it explored the issue from multiple perspectives and angles, and in selecting Eritrea as its starting point. I also thought the way the book managed to encompass so many issues and themes without it becoming in any way sensationalist was admirable; encompassing themes of family, grief, migration, poverty, prejudice, asylum and more - there is so much to unpack and consider here. I thought both Sammy and Nat were great narrators, with strong voices and a lot of heart, and I thought the character of Ryan was particularly well-drawn and emotive, with Fazel playing such an important and thought-provoking role too. I really loved the way Nat and Sammy’s stories overlapped, with the same phrase connecting them as we switched between narrators, and the way in which we see so many commonalities and connections between them, despite their apparent differences. The use of the countdown in the book only served to highlight the increasing tension and the feeling that we were hurtling towards something inevitable as the stories progressed and there was a real rawness to it as we are exposed to so many hard-hitting and uncomfortable truths and ideas. Unflinching, powerful, urgent and real – this was such a moving and important story skilfully told.

4.5, rounding up to 5 stars. "It must be here between the lines, the space between (his) words." For me, this quote sums the beauty of The Crossing, the incredible novel in verse by Manjeet Mann. Natalie Lennon, a talented 16 year old swimmer from Dover find herself facing homelessness when her family begins to unravels after her mother passes away with cancer. Her father, who is struggling with grief, can't keep them afloat and her newly adult brother Ryan is being seduced far right groups. Samuel Jabir, a 17 year boy Eritrean boy, looks to stars for hope after his father is killed for being a dissenter. As forced conscription, which already stole his sister Sophia and his high school crush Mariam, threaten to enslave him too, Sammy and his best friend Tesfay decide to make the perilous journey to UK to reunite with a cousin. The boys know they are "walking into death" but "the chance to love is worth dying for". Nat and Sammy complete each other's stories, the words and phrases repeating as move from one POV to the other. Mann's poetic language use, which we first became familiar with in her debut Run, Rebel, continued to create a haunting, portrait of the reality. My heart ached as I was immersed in both young protagonists' struggle for survival in a world where their humanity is being questioned. Grief at the loss of a parent, bravery in a harsh world, and ultimately being forced to grow up too early are all expressed with heart and vivid clarity, connecting the teenagers who share common human experiences despite their wildly different circumstances. And in this, despite not saying it out loud, Mann, reminds us that "We're all built from the same dust". The dust in question is Stardust. Stars are one of the few connections between Nat and Sammy - they both look up to the star-filled sky for inspiration and hope. The other more earthly connection is formed when they see each other on the news (Nat, who sees stories of refugees on the tv and Sammy sees an newspaper article about Nat's charity swim for Care4Calais in memory of her mother who was a refugee support worker). This connection, although more tangible, felt far more tenous for me. I would have preferred the two stories to stories to only ever intersect in anonymity, but that is just me. Instead, I would have preferred to see and hear more from Fazel, "the boy who came to (our) school last year. The boy who came on a boat." Although he plays a pivotal role in Nat's story, I wish we saw and heard more from him. Nat's other classmates: Kevin, who bullies and attacks Fazel constantly, and Mel, Nat's rich girlfried, both are fleshed out but their arcs don't quite end. Mel in particular, is another example of Mann's clever writing. While Ryan rages about a presumably non-white family moving into a house in the estate (he mentions "people born in this country should take priority" and gets chastisied by his sister) he doesn't bat an eyelid at "Mel's sea-view mansion". Even Nat's father is happy to work "renovating a mansion in the middle of Kent", while losing their community and home to the new, ironically named "Prospect Homes", a wealthy housing development. While Mel using her wealth to support Nat softens the blow, I wish we saw Nat question Mel's priviledge more, or even ask what makes Mel's family different from hers. There is a superb scenes early in the book where Nat and Mel eat sandwiches at school: Nat has corned beef, while Mel tucks in "some gourmet-supermarket-finest creation with houmous and roasted peppers." Or walk down the high street. Nat is window-shopping while thinking about the homeless woman in a shop doorway and how close she is to this fate, while Mel is weighed down with bags full of the latest gear. For such a poignant story, I wish Ryan's arc was better explored. We see Ryan through Nat's eyes and given that she has a stronger, more compassionate voice, we don't get to sympathise with his plight as much. There was plenty of opportunity to dig deeper into his descent to the far-right violence but with Nat's sermonising voice, these expereinces get lost. While I love slick, Hollywood-style cross-cutting of Sammy and Tesfay on the boat and Nat and crew at the protests against the far-right marches, equating Tesfay to Ryan felt cheap and almost disrespectful. Tesfay, in his entire being, represents the hope that his name translates to, which Ryan's undoing cannot ever come close to. We are reminded that Ryan is not a bigot as he got his sister a rainbow cake to celebrate her coming out, but his actions really speak louder than words. Even in his redemption, Ryan is not given a voice, rather he speaks after being prompted by his father. If there was a sequel or a companion novel, I would want it to be from the perspectives of the 2 sibling: Ryan and his descent into fascism, and Sophia and her survival as a forcefully conscripted soldier. I spoke little about Sammy, but that's because every word about him and his story broke my heart and inspired me in equal measures. It was his parts that I was most excited to read and I will forever be haunted by his words: "Language can so easily put you on top if you are lucky enough to be the ones giving out the labels. I guess migration is only a human right if you're the right type of human." Thank you Netgalley UK and Penguin Random House Children’s UK for sending me an advance reader copy in exchange of an honest review.

I don't have the words for how The Crossing affected me. Although it is set in 2018, sadly it still remains all too relevant for 2021 with right wing extremists fighting against refugees who have gone through hell to make it to this country. Both Nat and Sammy's stories were deeply moving in their own ways as Dover girl Nat grapples with the grief of her mother along with mounting financial hardships and Sammy from Eritrea makes the journey towards a new life in the UK. Without giving away spoilers, I full on body sobbed my way through the second half of the book. I firmly believe everyone should read this in schools as a lesson in empathy. I truly do not have the words, only a broken heart.