Ruby lives her life as ‘a golden child in the golden city’, Johannesburg, while racism and segregation put most of the country in hate-filled Soweto. It’s 1976 and apartheid is at its height, and although she’s been brought up to see character and not colour, it seems that the rest of the country hasn’t. A lot of her problems are based on boys and her friends. This is her school life, from which she must keep her family life a secret.

In her home, her parents have taught her racism is wrong and they do their best to encourage her. Her mother owns an art gallery where she displays Soweto’s greatest artists' work, and her father is a lawyer who does his best to bring justice to the persecuted. When Julian moves in it puts her home life in constant tension and fear, and when he gets attacked, even more. When she befriends an Afrikaans girl named Loretta, her parents start to question her judgement. When she falls in love with her brother, Johann, her school friends turn their backs on her too, led by Desmond, who also took her best friend away.

I would say the book is well written but although the parts about her home life and about the conflicts in Soweto are quite good, her school life is a bit unrealistic. Even so, I was quite enjoying the book until the end, which in my opinion was a complete let-down. In less than twenty pages, it completely changed the course of the book and left a lot of loose ends untied. I would say girls and women of most ages could enjoy this book, but I think boys would find it hard to relate to her school problems, especially as it’s written in the first person of a girl.

All in all I did quite like this book: it flowed well and although the ending was a let-down, the rest of it had a nice pace and it was quite believable.