I Am Not Your Baby Mother: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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Tackling the complexities of growing up Black and British, Cuts Both Ways is the first fiction title from the Sunday Times best-selling Candice Brathwaite, author of I Am Not Your Baby Mother. As a Nigerian migrant to the UK at a young age - a time when stories similar to this were not uncommon - I could picture most of the details in this story as I read each page. Yet in desperate times, I have found myself purchasing ‘smudge kits’ from white women running online businesses for ‘spiritual awakening’, many of whom I doubt know the roots of the practice from which they profit. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I’m getting on fairly well, yes, thank you, though whether I’ll finish it by the end of the month is slightly doubtful!

I listened to the audio version and the cadence of Michelle’s voice, especially when her father died, really moved me.

I read this with my book group and it gave us a lot to talk about although our as all of us are white we would have liked another perspective on the book from a Black woman reader. I would be interested in learning about other fiction books which capture the challenges young Black people in London face in relation to knife and gun crime.

Whilst I was able to relate to many of the of the experiences captured in the book, for me this book and your story reeked of Black joy and optimism and for this I as grateful. In a nutshell, Cuts Both Ways follows teenage Cynthia as she moves home and schools, from London to Buckinghamshire. What is meant to be a fresh start for Cynthia leads to a 'fish out of water' scenario in which she starts at a posh new school as one of the only black students.

The biggest culture shock is her transition to private school, where she finds herself torn between head boy Thomas, who is white, and his adopted brother Isaac, who is Black. What her autobiography taught me is to stop being consumed with my age or ageing out of success … Malorie didn’t get published until her mid 30s.

The little twist at the end was shocking but it happened and was over way too quickly and I felt things were left unresolved. I would recommend this book for someone who want to read something different from the normal setting of YA romance book but let me warn you, this book will leave you dumbfounded. You mean to tell me that these people, myself included, were giving their last, having to accept that the pain and suffering we were currently experiencing might go on forever as we know it, and whilst it was going on forever, we were supposed to rejoice and revel in it?

Candice is a successful author in both the non fiction and fiction spaces with her first book, ‘I am not your Baby Mother’ (2020) reaching the Sunday Times Bestseller list. Cuts Both Ways was a really powerful read and its ending – whilst not ambiguous – certainly allows for more of the story to be told and I really home that Candice Braithwaite turns it into a series. There she meets Issac, another black student who also comes from South London and shares the same sentiment for home as she does.

I’ve seen the stats about the higher mortality rates among Black mothers and infants before but this really brings it home; like Kendi’s wife in “ How to Raise an Anti-Racist“, Braithwaite has serious complications around the birth of her first child which are negated and downplayed until it’s almost too late. It was so evident that this book was written by someone much, much older with not much sense of modern youthfulness and their interaction. The text is accessible, gritty and authentic, making this the perfect book to use as a tool to spark discussions amongst teens about these important issues that are very much still prevalent.The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the many other knife crime incidents since then, some of which don’t even get reported put into perspective how serious knife crime is and that awareness needs to be raised throughout communities to help bring this to an end.