Originally Posted by Cassirin

Ok, I need a pep talk. I've read about a quarter of the book and I'm just not connecting with it. Maybe those of you who have read it and loved it can tell me what you love about it?

Hi <3

When I read it through the first time, back in 05ish... I was from the middle of the sticks, in Scotland... it was very sheltered and very much a community where families had been around for generations and had grown up together; everyone knew each other, got on and would do little jobs to help each other... My Dad was a postman, and we'd frequently have piles of mail for people on his round whenever they were on holiday, so it didn't clutter up the porch, or bigger parcels that wouldn't go through the letterbox.

Reading N&C was one of the first books I read that was so segragated... so conflicted. It sounds bad, but at 14/15, the role-reversal was huge, additionally as my part of Aberdeenshire wasn't multi-cultural 15 years ago. We had one boy whose parents were from Sri Lanka, and one Indian boy - everyone else was generations-deep. It made me realise how secluded and cut off I was - and as I was only about a year into being on SS at that point, I started to make a bigger effort on here to gain knowledge I couldn't get face to face.

There was a line in one of the chapters, after Callum got injured at school, where he out a plaster on his skin and noticed how much it stuck out, how obvious it was -- and until that point I'd never thought of the fact that nude plasters didn't match everyone. There were other ethnicities in Aberdeen, in the city... but I didn't see them in my day to day life at that point, being 20+ miles out.

This book is one of the reasons I moved away to Edinburgh for Uni, why I opened my eyes and took on the world around me. It's different now... Scotland is much more ethnically diverse even out in the sticks -- but it helped a lot, 15 years ago.