Malorie Blackman – Boys Don’t Cry

l21/04/2015

Deep down, we all suspected that thereโ€™d be a teenage version of Babyfather one of these days. Thank goodness Malorie Blackman got there first. You can sort of work out the storyline from the premise (Danteโ€™s waiting for his A-Level results and gets a baby daughter dumped on him) but whatโ€™s good about that is that you can see all the potential pitfalls coming and admire the author for resisting the obvious.

And sometimes, resisting the plausible. Anyone whoโ€™s seen what a baby does to someoneโ€™s life will be thinking โ€˜hang on, what aboutโ€ฆ?โ€™ at some of the curious omissions. Thereโ€™s nothing about making the house baby-safe, apart from one incident whenre sheโ€™s about to fall downstairs. Danteโ€™s dad would remember all of that from last time and embark on a massive DIY binge. Anyone with any experience of how A-Level results are delivered will wonder why heโ€™s waiting for the postman rather than going to his sixth-form to pick them up.

Whatโ€™s impressive is that the author seems to have a pretty good idea of how an all-male household works. Danteโ€™s mum died a few years back so itโ€™s him, his dad and his brother. Thereโ€™s an equally predictable sub-plot going on there which feeds in to the main one. It works as a novel, with this contrapuntal narrative and alternating narrators, but there are things along the way that act as information-dispensing cues (and the back of the book has those if you have been affected by these issues addresses and websites). Itโ€™s a work of fiction, designed to entertain. Only the baby and the brother ever get described, so that anyone reading can see themselves in one or more characters (itโ€™s scrupilously non-race-specific, unlike the trailer โ€“ yes, books get trailers now) and the U-certificate not-quite-swearing hints at what the people involved would really have said in the circumstances.

By Tat Wood