Lily's Crossing, or The Lies Lily Let Loose

            Lily’s not your typical heroine.  Lily’s Crossing is about a girl, named Lily, who is living with her father and grandmother in 1944.  Lily lies, a lot.  She lies to her friend (yes, she only has one), she lies to her Gram, she lies to anyone who will listen.  She is aware of the fact that she lies and she lists this as her number one problem.  She also isn’t quite a thief, but she has been sneaking into movie theaters since she was six years old.  She is also very, very nosy.  Somehow, though, I can accept all that because this story is told through the eyes of a child.  She’s not malicious in her lies or when she sneaks into a movie.  Her friend Margaret has a brother, Eddie, who is fighting in the war, and Lily and Margaret eat the candy that Margaret’s mother had been intending to send to him.  This is not the action of a heroine, but it is what one would expect of a child who really has no idea about the levity of the situation around her.

            Lily soon begins to understand, however, that things in the world are serious.  Each year, Lily goes to Rockaway with her Gram and Poppy, where Lily spends the summer swimming and having a good time with her friend Margaret.  This summer, the summer of 1944, everything changes.  Margaret and her family move to Detroit, where Margaret’s father is helping to build bombers.  Then, Lily’s father is sent away to war.  Lily is so angry with her father that she doesn’t even say goodbye to him before he leaves.   Lily soon meets Albert, who is the nephew of her neighbors, the Orbans.  He comes from Hungary and wants nothing more than to go get his sister, who is still in France. 

            At first, there seems to be nothing in common between Lilly and Albert, but they soon form a deep friendship.  Lily tells Albert a lie, one so big that it could hurt both Lily and Albert.  Albert tells Lily that his parents were killed for writing a newspaper that spoke out against the Nazis.  Lily tells Albert a secret she had told no one.  Before her mother died when she was still very young, she pasted stars on the wall of their home in St. Alban.  Every year, Lily would take one of those stars off the wall in St. Alban and paste it to her bed in Rockaway so that it felt like her mother was with her.  Lily and Albert spend that summer swimming, going to movies, and trying to figure out a way to make their lives right again.

            The picture on the front has to be one of the most perfect covers I have ever seen for a book.  I look at this little girl and I see Lily.  Behind her I see the spot where she would row her boat and try to teach Albert to swim.  I wonder when this picture was taken, and where, because it is a cover that really fits with the image I had of the book in my mind.  I think that the stamp at the bottom is also a very nice touch.

            I think that this is a very good book for students in middle school.  It is not only a good story, but also very informative.  I can just imagine students asking “Why couldn’t people get any butter?” and “Why did Mr. Orban have to save the last of his gas?”  I really appreciate the fact that Albert is from Hungary, because it is a country that students probably do not know much about.  Of course students know France and Germany, but did they know that World War II affected so many countries in the world?  The setting of this book is so far removed from the actual fighting of the war, but it shows the reader that it still hit home.  Everything is affected by the war, and Lily’s Crossing gives readers a glimpse into what it must have been to live during that time.

            One of the most interesting things about this book is that Patricia Reilly Giff, the author, is writing the story about her childhood.  This story is fiction, but she says she remembers being a small girl during World War II and wanted to bring a story to her readers about what life was like.  She writes in her author’s note at the end of the story that “I remember the fears of that time, and how personal it all was.  I was surprised that other people, sometimes even adults, thought about the same things I did and had much the same worries.”  I feel that this adds to the value of the book because it is not just an historical fiction novel written by someone who did research about the time period.  Instead, this book is written by someone who lived through the experience.

            I am writing a positive review about this book, but honestly, it was not a book that really made me sit and think afterwards, or one that made me cry at the horrors of life and the cruelty of the world.  I can’t precisely explain why, but to me this book was just okay.  I was expecting to experience the pull on my heart that I had gotten when I read Pictures of Hollis Woods, a book written by the same author.  But in reality, I felt nothing.  I felt like this story was extremely predictable, and somehow Lily’s story reminded me of Molly from the American Girl series.   In order to really connect to a book, you have to feel happy or sad or angry or depressed.  After I read this book, I just thought “Well that was nice.”  I am not saying this is a bad book, because it is not.  It was a Newberry Honor book and tons of people have read it and loved it.  I think that many of my students will read this book and think it is wonderful and really learn a lot from it.  A great book may not be so great for certain people and I think I will take away from my reading of this book that that is okay.

            One extra note.   This book had a quote in it that I thought was utterly fantastic.  It is about saying goodbye to someone.  This was on a very literal level, because Lily was so angry at her father that she did not say goodbye to him before he left for the war.  I think, though, that this can be extended to think about people that we have lost in our lives.  Lily’s father says “’I told her that saying goodbye didn’t matter, not a bit.  What mattered were all the days you were together before that, all the things you remembered.”

            Now I pose a question to you.  Have you ever read a book that you knew was wonderful, and that everyone in the world had told you was wonderful, but then you read it and decided you didn’t like it?  I can only think of one book where I really just hated it (I didn’t hate this book, it just didn’t really resonate with me), even though everyone said it was great and it was a #1 New York Times’ Bestseller, and that is Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.  After I read this book I was upset that I had spent so much of my time reading it!