Lynne Rae Perkins  Criss Cross
      337 pp. Greenwillow 9/05 ISBN 0-06-009272-6 $15.99 g
      Library edition ISBN 0-06-009273-4 $16.89
      (Middle School, High School)
Catching fireflies in a jar, fourteen-year-old Debbie (first met in Perkins’s spectacular debut novel All Alone in the Universe, rev. 9/99) watches the bugs’ “glow parts go on and off,” appeasing her guilt over capturing them by convincing herself that “once they were free, their small, basic brains would . . . have no memory of being imprisoned.” Perkins’s wonderfully contemplative and relaxed yet captivating second novel, again illustrated with her own perfectly idiosyncratic spot art, is a collection of fleeting images and sensations — some pleasurable, some painful, some a mix of both — from her ensemble cast’s lives. Like All Alone in the Universe, the story is set in a 1970s small town, but teen readers won’t have to be aware of the time period to feel connected to Debbie, Hector, Lenny, and the rest as the third-person narrative floats back and forth between their often humorous, gradually evolving perspectives. The book’s title refers to a radio show that the neighborhood teens listen to on Saturday evenings; on a thematic level, it also refers to those barely perceptible moments of missed communication between a boy and a girl, a parent and a child, when “something might have happened” but didn’t. In keeping with Perkins’s almost Zen-like tone, such flubbed opportunities are viewed as unfortunate but not tragic. “Maybe it was another time that their moments would meet.” Like a lazy summer day, the novel induces that exhilarating feeling that one has all the time in the world. C.M.H.