Criss Cross

Criss Cross is a coming-of-age novel, which traces Debbie and her Seldem friends’ journeys towards self-realization. Debbie, Hector, Lenny, Patty, and Phil are all 14 years old. As adolescents, they’re in a transitional phase of life—straddling the boundary between their childhoods and adulthoods. As a result, Debbie and her friends are compelled to ask questions about where they come from and who they want to be in the future.

Because Debbie is the novel’s protagonist, the narrative prioritizes her self-discovery journey over her friends’. At the same time, Hector’s, Lenny’s, Patty’s, and Phil’s concurrent searches inform Debbie’s. At the novel’s start, Debbie feels trapped in her banal life in Seldem. This static, predictable setting complicates Debbie’s ability to explore the world and herself on her own terms. The town’s name “Seldem” evokes “seldom,” representing the lack of change in Debbie’s life. The image of her sitting on her sister’s bed, wearing her sister’s sweater and lip gloss, and reading her sister’s magazine in Chapter 1 conveys Debbie’s attempt to form a sense of self by emulating other women.