ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the activities of keeping, transmitting, and detecting secrets in Malorie Blackman's fictions of family. The essay considers the extent to which the desire to escape or withhold certain truths creates a context that puts into relief the unequal distribution of power across lines of social, political, and material difference, amid the complex interplay of the personal and the political. It argues that Blackman's novels use secrecy to assert their characters’ rights to evade full exposure, even while at the same time striving towards the unbound fabric of both the narrative and its fictional selves in a challenge to the young reader to look beyond the artificiality of socio-cultural narratives and to countervailing spaces in which voices from outside the mainstream of societies can speak and be heard.
