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Booktalking Colorado Full Record:
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Title: |
Desert Crossing |
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Author: |
Broach, Elise |
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Date Published: |
2006 |
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Genre: |
Adventure |
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Grade Level: |
6 - 8 |
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Booktalker: |
Kathleen Borrelli |
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Booktalk:
Have you ever done something that made you feel terribly guilty? That’s exactly what happens to Lucy, the protagonist of this story, when she steals a bracelet off the body of a dead girl. Now, you might be wondering how Lucy came to be in the presence of a dead girl, which leads us to the circumstances surrounding this story.
It’s spring break and siblings Jamie and Lucy along with Jamie’s obnoxious friend, Kit, are headed toward Phoenix to visit Jamie and Lucy’s father. Crossing the New Mexico desert late at night in a horrible rainstorm, the car hits something Jamie insists is a coyote. The boys want to continue, but Lucy persuades them to return to find out if that is, indeed, what happened. Within minutes their lives are altered. It is one of those moments when everything changes so quickly, it’s as if there’s a line between “then” and “now” and you can feel yourself stepping over it and you don’t want to because you know you can’t go back. This is what happened when, instead of finding a dead coyote, they found the body of a dead girl.
Questions about the girl bombard Lucy’s mind: Are they responsible for her death? Should they report it, leave her, move her? How did she get to the middle of nowhere? Why is she alone? Why doesn’t she even have a backpack or anything to identify her? Why is her only possession a charm bracelet ? Yes, the very bracelet Lucy ends up stealing. And, it is this bracelet that might be the key piece of evidence that could help answer all those questions in Lucy’s mind, but Lucy feels compelled to have some reminder of this girl, thus, her justification for the theft.
Deciding to report the incident, the kids are taken in by a local neighbor while the police investigate. Not satisfied with police findings, Lucy chooses to investigate on her own using a drawing she’d made of the dead girl. The three travelers end up having experiences they could not have imagined regarding crime, revenge, sordid love affairs, guilt and blame. Will their lives ever return to a semblance of normalcy again?
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