Crispin: The Cross of Lead by Avi

5th grade and up

Historical novels have been among my favorites since I started reading the Little House series in the third grade, but stories set in the Middle Ages are generally not appealing to me unless they have dragons or wizards to shake up the monotony of plowing fields for the lord of the manor or fighting the king’s war to fill his coffers. Maybe reading Chaucer in the Middle English ruined my view, or perhaps it was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, with all its ridicule of the feudal system. However, I picked up Crispin anyway because I knew I could rely on Avi to tell a good story, and I trusted the Newbery Medal sticker on its cover. The political and historical aspects were, as I expected, my least favorite parts of the book, but I did enjoy it as a whole because of its reliance on a number of archetypal images, which I love to pick out and explore. Crispin is the classic put-upon orphan with an important and mysterious past, and Bear is the mentor and huge protector. He is almost like an academic Little John, or a mixture of John and Friar Tuck, though Crispin is no Robin Hood. The boy spends too much time worrying about himself to qualify as a do-gooder, but his worry is for survival’s sake, not selfish reasons; as Bear says, Crispin is one of the most innocent souls ever created. And the steward is very much like a Sheriff of Nottingham in his one-dimensional evil plots to keep Crispin from taking his rightful place.

What keeps the book from being a generic adventure tale, however, are the moral questions Crispin must confront, as well as the inundation of religious thought in everything Crispin does. He’s a good boy, and Bear is a good man, but their theologies are vastly different, with Crispin hanging on to the traditional views of the Catholic church of his time, and Bear espousing more modern, and thus more radical, ideals presaging Luther and Calvin – Bear’s theology goes farther to the left than even these reformers. These are heady issues for a children’s book, but because Avi stays so truly inside this child’s head, he pulls them off while telling a stirring adventure.