The Crossing

March 13, 1995
This second volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy-an 11-week PW bestseller-follows two teenage boys across the American Southwest and Mexico in the years before WWII.

Billy Parham is just a boy of 16 when he crosses into Mexico to return a wounded wolf to her mountain home. But there he crosses more than a national boundary. He rides a journey from life through death to the dark places where only the gods lie in wait. Gently but with comforting regularity, Alexander Adams (aka Grover Gardner) narrates the passage across that border. The deliberate opaqueness in McCarthy's text calls for a reader of Adams's craft and stature. His voice has the authority and confidence of an adult telling a story, the meaning and wisdom of which he knows well. This confidence is important to the reader--as an anchor is to a boat adrift on rough seas. For The Crossing, indeed for all of Cormac McCarthy's work, is a rough sea, and Adams gives us this minimal but necessary assurance that the voyage will be worth it. P.E.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine