Criss Cross

In 2006, author Lynne Rae Perkins won the Newbery Medal for Criss Cross, a novel for middle-grade readers that follows her earlier book All Alone in the Universe. The novel, a loose, updated take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, revolves around the ways in which a group of teenagers connects or misses connecting with one another during a summer in a small town in the early 1970s. Drawing on Perkins’s knowledge of printmaking and design, Criss Cross incorporates drawings, diagrams, changing typefaces, and layout tricks, such as telling the same story from two people’s points of view by arranging their narratives in adjacent text columns. Each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective – including one told from the point of view of a necklace imbued with slight magical qualities. Their plotlines progress in intersecting ways, but this summary will describe what happens to each in turn, instead.

Debbie, a fourteen-year-old, is excited about another summer hanging out with her friends in the small town of Seldem, just as they have every summer before, although she wishes that something exciting would happen this time. As the school year comes to an end, Debbie and her friends – Patty, Hector, Lenny, and Phil – do the usual things, like getting ice cream and listening to music in Lenny’s dad’s parked truck.

But, there is something different about this summer – and Debbie decides to seize the moment and make some changes in her own life. With her parents’ approval, she moves her things into the small front parlor of the house, having her own room for the first time in her life. She also finds a job as a companion to Mrs. Bruning, an older woman who needs assistance with a few daily tasks. When Mrs. Bruning has a health crisis, her grandson Peter arrives in Selden. He and Debbie have a brief romance during the course of a week, holding hands and exploring a nearby town. But, once the week is up, he leaves to return to California.

Hector also wishes for something to change for him during the summer. His sister Rowanne invites him to listen to a guitarist at a coffee shop, but when he gets there, he realizes that Rowanne is just using him as a cover story for her date with a boy. After Hector hears the guitarist, he decides to learn how to play. Hector joins a guitar lesson club at a church near his house, where he meets and immediately develops romantic feelings for Meadow, a girl also taking guitar lessons. Unfortunately, she has a crush on yet another guitar student – Dan Persik, a high school football player. Unwilling to read her signals, Hector tries to find reasons to be alone with Meadow, eventually asking her on a date, only to be rejected as she explains that she only sees him as a friend.

Lenny has been discovering that his type of intelligence might not be the best fit for school. One of his teachers has encouraged him to use his mechanical abilities and to transfer to the vocational-technical track in school. During the summer, he tries chewing tobacco, which everyone finds disgusting. He also has a potentially romantic moment with Debbie when he starts teaching her how to drive a stick shift. Lenny joins his dad in fixing and building things. One of their projects is constructing a large pig roaster for the big neighborhood block party that ends the summer.

The novel ends with the pig roast and the town party that surrounds it. Afterward, the four friends hang out on the roof, singing along to music, and catching fireflies. They each realize that they have grown and changed during the course of the summer. Debbie feels more mature and less self-involved – she has seen that she is good at helping other people and that she has grown more independent. Hector has developed more self-confidence and now realizes that he doesn’t need to define himself by what other people think of him. Meanwhile, Lenny has grown to appreciate his skills and intelligence in a new way, having had a chance to see what he is good at.

Although the novel won the Newbery, its reception has been mixed. On the one hand, critics such as Kirkus Reviews have praised it as a “tenderly existential work that will reward more thoughtful readers.” On the other hand, the School Library Journal worries about its slow pace and unexciting plot, calling it one of the “particularly disappointing” Newberry winners.