Sunday, May 17, 2009

Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins


One of the more enjoyable of the Newberry Award winning books. Criss Cross is a "coming of age" story of a group of young people in a small town. The title refers to how peoples' lives seem to criss cross and how people and new experiences are brought into our paths.

One of my favorite passages describes the choice of having new experiences in our lives:

"I think," he [Peter] said, "that it's a good thing to get out of your usual, you know, surroundings. Because you find things out about yourself that you didn't know, or you forgot. And then you go back to your regular life and you're changed, you're a little bit different because you take those new things with you. Like a Hindu, except all in one life: you sort of get reincarnated depending on what happened and what you figure out. And any one place can make you go forward, or backward, or neither, but gradually you find all your pieces, your important pieces, and they stay with you, so that you're your whole self no matter where you go. Your Buddha self. That's my theory, anyway."
Perkins, Lynne Rae. Criss Cross. (2005). New York:HarperCollins. pg.267.

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