Story about a girl who cuts herself who meets a fellow cutter. Together they experiment with drugs, boys, and their limits with parent, health, and their lives. This book was very negative and the girls were doing something stupid or dangerous every other page which got boring. ( )

Crosses is a very short read. Clocking in at under 200 pages, dont pick it up if you are looking for substance in a piece of work. it is a light and fluffy (read: overly dramatic and generally droll) approach to teenage cutting, drug use, and sex. The author, Shelley Stoehr, has written many similar books with titles such as Weird on the outside and Wannabe. so it looks like she had some success with crosses and decided to relive her youthful self-depreciating behavior through books and make a little nest egg of money to go with her work.

All that said, i am not dissing on the book. it was enjoyable, in as much as you can expect being inside the head of a fifteen year old girl on the decline can be “fun”. Nancy, the main character, pushes the story line through its motions in a first person semi-journal style. there are no dates on the chapters, nor cheesy “dear diary” lines tossed in, just narrative. She is whiney and pig headed, self serving and lacking wit. in essence, she is your average stereotypical jr high school girl.

Nancy is fairly average. she does well in school, but is tired of being the smart person in classes. she wants to stand out. she begins to wear safety pins in her ears and decks herself out in punk rock “fashion” but has no known knowledge of the punk rock world. her favorite “band” is David Bowie. Nancy meets a girl in the bathroom one day. her name is Katie. Katie and Nancy share the same fascination with cutting themselves in order to feel something they both closely associate with their assumed reality, pain. they become fast friends after that moment. they share drugs, steal together, generally raise hell together. mainly they just lay about sick from whatever drug or drink they imbibed too much of in the last chapter.

putting myself back in the combat boots i wore in highschool, i can see this being either a prized placement book on my bookshelf, or just as easily, being set fire and tossed into a recyc box as a trash novel intending to use scare tactics to bring children away from drug use. i cant tell you which it would have been as i am far too different of a person now, but i did honestly enjoy the book. it was refreshing to read someone elses misery and cluelessness.

though it was definitely not at my reading level, i can see where this could have been used as a handbook for me and my friends as kids.. each chapter could have assisted us ever so slightly (or so we would have presumed) thus saving us the terrible experiences she had. we would, of course, have still made many similar mistakes because we would have been reading a book of FICTION THAT IS LOOSELY BASED ON REALITY, but that really is beside the point.

some lessons we would have learned:

* “dont drink so much that you pass out and nearly get raped”
* “3 easy ways to shoplift”
* “concert survival on hash brownies”
* “mixed drinks and beer are not your friends”
* “what not to do when shrooming” ( )

A very special book to me, I first read this book about a teenage cutter while I was a cutter... I think it was the first time I really understood how serious and widespread it was. Many passages in this book mirrored my life almost eerily. ( )

cliques and cutting-male protagonist-Just OK.