Criss Cross

Criss Cross is a novel by Lynne Rae Perkins that won the 2006 Newbery Medal for excellence in children's literature. The book, set in the 1960s or 1970s, centers on the coming-of-age of four small-town teenagers. Though the town is named Seldem, several of the book's illustrations echo Cheswick, Pennsylvania, a suburb fourteen miles northeast of Pittsburgh where Perkins was born and raised. "Writing in a wry, omniscient third-person narrative voi... more

Criss Cross is a novel by Lynne Rae Perkins that won the 2006 Newbery Medal for excellence in children's literature. The book, set in the 1960s or 1970s, centers on the coming-of-age of four small-town teenagers. Though the town is named Seldem, several of the book's illustrations echo Cheswick, Pennsylvania, a suburb fourteen miles northeast of Pittsburgh where Perkins was born and raised. "Writing in a wry, omniscient third-person narrative voice, Perkins deftly captures the tentativeness and incompleteness of adolescence," said Award Committee Chair Barbara Barstow. "In 38 brief chapters, this poetic, postmodern novel experiments with a variety of styles: haiku, song lyrics, question-and-answer dialogue and split-screen scenarios. With seeming yet deliberate randomness, Perkins writes an orderly, innovative, and risk-taking book in which nothing happens and everything happens." less