Criss Cross

Debbie and her friends Hector, Lenny, Patty, and the newly arrived Phil drift through a single summer in the small town of Seldom sometime in the early 1970s, hanging out mostly in the bed of Lenny's father's parked truck with nothing much required of them and nothing much happening, which is exactly the point. Debbie wishes something would happen to her, and the novel tracks the small somethings that do: Hector picks up a guitar and falls for a girl named Meadow, Lenny tinkers endlessly with radios and machines while chafing at how poorly school testing captures what he actually knows, and a lost necklace that later turns up gives several of the characters a small, private nudge toward figuring out who they are becoming. Perkins tells the story from a rotating set of viewpoints and breaks the prose up with drawings, song lyrics, and other inserted pieces, so the book reads as much like a scrapbook of one summer as a single continuous story. Nothing arrives in the form of a crisis; the closest the book comes to a climax is a block party at the end of summer where the friend group, without any single character noticing the exact moment, has quietly shifted into people slightly closer to who they will be next.

Perkins writes with a wistful, observational patience that some readers find hypnotic and others find frustratingly plotless, and the book asks readers to sit with the ordinary texture of adolescence, boredom, longing, small embarrassments, rather than deliver a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It suits a reader who already loves character over incident far more than one hoping for adventure, and its loose, essayistic structure marks it as one of the more unconventional books to hold the medal.