Toffee by Sarah Crossan Review: A Verse Novel of Identity and Unlikely Refuge

Toffee tells the story of Allison, a teenager who has run away from her abusive father while searching for Kelly-Anne, his former fiancée — the one adult who offered her real care. Stranded in a Cornish seaside town, Allison takes refuge in what appears to be an abandoned house, only to find that Marla, an elderly woman living with dementia, still resides there. When Marla mistakes Allison for a childhood friend named Toffee, Allison accepts the role without correction. The deception that begins as pure survival gradually becomes something more complicated: as Allison grows closer to Marla, she becomes less willing to sustain the fiction and begins, instead, to search for the shape of her own true self. The novel's title, then, carries a dual weight — it is both the name Allison performs and the identity she must ultimately shed.

Crossan has been described by critical coverage as the driving force behind the verse novel's resurgence on this side of the Atlantic. Her 2011 debut, The Weight of Water, earned wide acclaim; One, a story of conjoined twins, won the Carnegie Medal in 2016; and Moonrise, following a boy saying farewell to a brother on death row, was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Children's Prize. Toffee arrives within this body of work as a continuation of recurring preoccupations — belonging, identity, grief, trauma, and the struggle to carve out one's place in the world. Understanding this lineage matters: Crossan is not a writer dabbling in verse as a novelty but an author who has built a sustained, decorated body of work entirely within the form.

The novel is divided into short verse pieces, typically a page or two in length. Critical coverage describes each of these pieces as "as satisfying as a smoothed piece of seaglass, strung together to create a spectrum of pain and consolation," adding that "the sparse words reveal the artistry in every phrase." The review further notes that the book is saturated with a sense of secrecy, quoting the lines: "We nudged the truth out of the way with our elbows / And waded through heavy silence." This compression — the choice to say only what is essential — is the form's central gamble, and it is one Crossan has practised across multiple acclaimed titles. The short, self-contained pieces are designed to be individually resonant while accumulating into a larger emotional arc, making the verse structure inseparable from the novel's themes of silence, evasion, and eventual disclosure.

Beyond its plot mechanics, Toffee engages seriously with dementia, domestic abuse, and mental health, as well as the question of what constitutes a family. The publisher, Bloomsbury, describes the novel as exploring "mental health and friendship while asking what it means to be a family." These are not incidental concerns: the central relationship between Allison and Marla forces both characters into a space where conventional identity markers — names, histories, roles — become unstable, and where genuine human connection has to be negotiated around loss and deception. The novel asks, pointedly, how a person can know who they truly are when others have always defined them — a question that resonates across both the teenage experience of abuse and the experience of dementia.

Published by Bloomsbury YA with a recommended reading age of 13 and up, Toffee is squarely aimed at older teenage readers, though Crossan's verse novels have historically attracted adult readers alongside younger audiences. Readers who respond to compressed, poetic storytelling — and who are prepared for subject matter encompassing domestic abuse, cognitive decline, and identity crisis — will find the form well-matched to the emotional weight of the material. Those expecting a conventional prose narrative may need time to settle into the rhythm of the verse structure, as the form demands a different kind of reading attention than chapter-based fiction. For readers already familiar with Crossan's earlier work, Toffee will read as a confident extension of her signature voice and concerns.