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Podcast #043

For my forty-third Dream Gardens kid lit podcast, I interviewed author Kat Shepherd about her favorite children’s book, the middle grade novel  Criss Cross, written  and illustrated by Lynne Rae Perkins.

Originally published in 2005, and awarded the Newbery in 2006, the novel tells the story  a single summer in the life of a group of young teens. There is Debbie, who wishes something would happen, though she isn’t quite sure what, and Hector, who’s hoping he can find a way to connect to someone special out there through the guitar he’s learning to play.  Their stories, and the stories of several others, intersect with each other in unexpected ways, and though things don’t quite work out for anyone in the ways they’d hoped for, by the end of the summer they’re a little bit wiser about what life has to offer them.  Criss Cross is a unique novel, thoughtful and lyrical and even somewhat experimental in its stream of consciousness narrative and structural playfulness, but at its heart a coming of age story about the joys, the discoveries, the disappointments, and the heartaches of growing up.

Kat Shepherd is author of The Shadow Hand, Book 1 of the series Babysitting Nightmares, and coming in 2019, the interactive mystery series The Gemini Mysteries. You can find Kat’s website at katshepherd.com.

All podcasts are available on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and now Spotify. Please link, share, comment, or subscribe. And if you are interested in participating in the Dream Gardens podcast, send me a request through my contact page. My next podcast will be with author Margaret Petersen Haddix, talking about Lisa Yee’s middle grade novel Millicent Min, Girl Genius. It will be published on November 16th.