Crossing Lines

by Paul Volponi

Overview

Adonis is a jock. He's on the football team and he's dating one of the prettiest girls in school. Alan is the new kid. He wears lipstick and joins the Fashion Club. Soon enough the football team is out to get him. Adonis is glad to go along with his teammates . . . until they come up with a dangerous plan to humiliate Alan. Now Adonis must decide whether he wants to be a guy who follows the herd or a man who does what's right.

From critically acclaimed author Paul Volponi comes this discussable and finely wrought story of bullies, victims, and the bystanders caught in between.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101529041
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	06/09/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Lexile:	810L (what's this?)
File size:	356 KB
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Paul Volponi is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novel Black & White. From 1992 to 1998, he taught adolescents on Rikers Island in New York City to read and write. Mr. Volponi worked at a day treatment center like Daytop teaching students and helping them prepare for the GED. Mr. Volponi lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 9 Up—Adonis is a football player. He's not the quarterback. He's not a leader. He's not the star. So when an effeminate transfer student named Alan starts at his school, and all his football-player friends resolve to make fun of him, Adonis is trapped. He can't go against his friends because he doesn't want to be ridiculed, too. Things become even more complicated when his sister Jeannie and girlfriend Melody form a close friendship with Alan, who eventually starts coming to school wearing lipstick and calling himself Alana. When they are paired together in a school project, Adonis gets to know Alana better and realizes that, while he's still struggling to discover his identity, he's not the monster that his friends make him out to be. When a foul plot to humiliate Alana during a public fashion show is revealed, Adonis has a decision to make. Does he say nothing? Or does he stand up for what he thinks is right? While this title highlights the relevant issue of LGBT bullying, Adonis's crisis of conscience comes a little too late. He spends the early half of the story thinking that Alan is disgusting and wrong, so much so that his redemptive turn at the end seems almost out of character. However, focusing neither on Alan/Alana nor the true bully, Ethan, the story convincingly presents the perspective of the guy uncomfortably stuck in the middle.—Ryan Donovan, New York Public Library

School Library Journal

Message trumps story in this chronicle of homophobia set on the gridiron. High school jock Adonis (really), a formerly pudgy kid, operates cautiously, constantly worried he'll be the next target of the bullies on his team. But they've got their hands full torturing Alan, an openly gay transfer student who, perhaps bolstered by the fellow members (all girls) of the school's Fashion Club, has started wearing lipstick and dresses to school. This is more than the football players can abide, and a takedown is planned. For Adonis, it's a no-win situation. If he outs the planned attack, he'll become a pariah among his teammates; if he remains quiet, he'll alienate his sister and girlfriend, who know Alan through Fashion Club. While the bullying issue has gravitas and Volponi (Rikers High) creates a believable atmosphere of masculine one-upmanship and pervasive homophobia, his characters are stereotypes: Alan's father is a no-nonsense military colonel, while Adonis's mother preaches tolerance and acceptance. The denouement is predictable, and Adonis's sudden location of a moral compass by story's end meshes with the after-school special tone of the narrative. Ages 12–up. (June)

Publishers Weekly

An unsubtle and old-fashioned exploration of homophobia.

The football team is grossed out when Alan, flamboyantly effeminate, transfers to their high school (cue a relentless stream of homophobic jokes). The novel's narrator, varsity player Adonis, battling a negative body image from chubbier days, is no exception. His homophobia is nurtured by his firefighter dad and frowned on by his teacher mom and sister Jeannie, the school's Fashion Club VP and Alan's friend. That Alan, the club's sole male, is its president goes unnoticed; gender bias is beyond the one-issue scope. Alan's dad is an Army colonel and clueless bigot. Manliness here equals homophobia; the one tolerant male adult is Adonis' hippie, ponytailed English teacher. Adonis' dilemma propels the action. (Oddly, he's never teased about his name). Melody, the girl he's pursuing, believes, approvingly, that Adonis belongs to the pro-Alan faction. Adonis' football-team peers will reject him unless he treats Alan with ridicule and contempt. Chief among these one-dimensional stereotypes is Alan—kind, noble and the dullest drag queen ever to wear dresses and lipstick. Is he gay, transsexual, cross-dressing or questioning? We're never told. Nuanced distinctions of character don't exist in this curiously retro world in which no one watches Glee and gays in the military aren't on anyone's radar.

Weighed down by earnest good intentions, this tale of high-school homophobia falls flat. (Fiction. 12 & up)

Kirkus Reviews