Sarah Crossan - One

One was announced as the 2016 Carnegie Medal winner a few weeks ago, so I've interrupted my own working-backwards-from-the-most-recent-to-the-beginning approach to my Carnegie reviews project to include it here. One's USP amongst the rest of the 70-odd prior winners of the award is that it is the first winner written entirely in free verse. So, a rare victory for the increasingly marginalised forms of poetry and verse over prose, and happily, it is well-suited to Crossan's chosen subject matter.

One is concerned with twins Grace and Tippi - two separate bodies, minds and personalities, conjoined at the hip since birth and recently turned sixteen. Crossan doesn't shy away from the cruelties and casually invasive attitudes of strangers towards the twins - the nasty notes pinned to school lockers; the stares, whispers and slyly taken photos and videos taken when out in public. Nor are the twins' immediate family portrayed as holier-than-thou types who bend over backwards to give the girls a life as normal as possible (a pet hate of mine in this genre) - instead, Dad's struggling to find work and manage a drinking problem, Mum is trying to make ends meet while coping with the desperately high cost of the twins' medical bills (the story is set in the USA) and the girls' older sister, Dragon, appears to be suffering from an eating disorder and has to watch her own dreams of becoming a ballet dancer shunted to one side by the family as money gets too tight to mention.

One is not just an abject study of misery and medical drama, though: in fact, it can actually be wryly amusing in its own way. The twins are forced to attend a local school to save money (having been home schooled until 16), and Crossan observes the girls making friends, experiencing crushes, smoking and drinking and behaving like typical teenagers with an arched, non-judgmental eyebrow. There's no great revelation when the girls suddenly realise that maybe all this stuff might be bad for them and vow to behave better in future - they enjoy what they're doing; in short, acting like teenagers do in real life and experiencing all the things they are told they shouldn't do. And although the inevitable 'cruel twist of fate' does arrive midway through the story, this is where Crossan's choice of free verse comes into its own; rather than overstuffing the final pages of the story with weeping and emotion and OTT hysterics, the minimalist style leaves us to fill in many of the blanks ourselves, and is no less powerful for it - it is poignant and tragic without having to hammer the message home too hard to its reader.

One is a quick read - I'd finished it in a couple of hours, but it's the sort of work that could be transformed into something completely different by reading aloud, allowing its words and spaces and pauses to be savoured and contemplated, as opposed to my usual style of rush-reading without paying enough attention to the rhythm of the writing that this style demands. It's not perfect; Crossan tells the story entirely from Grace's point of view, when I would have liked to have seen Tippi's perspective on things from time to time; some of the family problems are a little too easily and conveniently resolved and a bit towards the end where the girls fulfil a lifetime wish of climbing a tree steers a little too close to twee cliché for my liking. However, it's heart-rending, sympathetic and knowledgeable of its characters' plight without making them appear as victims and maintains an undercurrent of humour and hope throughout. The Carnegie Medal has often pushed boundaries and rewarded the unusual, experimental and controversial; One is nothing ground-breaking in terms of its plot, but its free verse style makes it stand out from the 2016 crowd - probably not my choice for this year's winner, but not a terrible option for the judges to choose nonetheless.