Description
Raul Luis “Ruly” Cruz is a young Mexican American who lives in El Paso, just across the Rio Grande from Mexico, home of his an-cestors and some of his current relatives. As he grows from awkward adolescent to manhood, he negotiates the precarious borders of family, tradition, and identity trying to find his own place in the Chicano community and in the larger world. This is an engaging and moving story of growing up in a borderland that is not only geographical but cultural as well.

Reviews
“The writing is excellent. Very sly story-telling, assured, calm, and enveloping. ” - Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Hummingbird’s Daughter

“An intimate portrait of a young boy’s coming of age in El Paso, rich with details of the body and the landscape of the border. The rollercoaster in Ascarate Park, the murals of El Segundo Barrio, the ASARCO smokestacks, Chicos Tacos, the Cristo Rey monument. I felt transported back to the games and silences of my own childhood in that place-in-between.” - Alicia Gaspar de Alba, author of Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders

"The novel addresses a great subject, the life of a teenaged boy living in the fascinating and underexplored border area near El Paso and Juárez. The narrator, Raul, has a fertile nerdy mind and often a unique and interesting literary voice. This novel is a wonderful and funny look at the border and one boy’s life there.” - Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon

"A thoughtful story of growing up next to the border in New Mexico and the assortment of challenges that go with it all, 'Cross Over Water' is a thoughtful read and very solidly recommended." -- The Midwest Book Review

" 'Cross Over Water' is set to become a sentimental favorite of El Paso insiders who will recognize the many businesses and sites that have become institutions or cherished memories of the international border; but so too will outsiders appreciate an alternative path into a city that's been more closely--and unfairly--associated with conflict than community." -- El Paso Times

"Yanez deftly explores the coming-of-age of Raul Luis Cruz, a Mexican American teenager who grows up in El Paso, just across the Rio Grande from Juarez, still home to many of his relatives. At 12, after his mother gets a promotion, Raul and his family moves to a northern suburb, a step up from the Lower Valley where he grew up, leaving behind his beloved neighborhood "like a lizard tail in the desert." In high school, he finds his niche as team manager of the football team, and takes pride in his job bagging groceries at Big Way Foods. But after graduation, Raul knows he must "evolve" into something more; the problem is knowing just which path to take. His new girlfriend, a college student from California, volunteering with the homeless in People's Park for the summer, opens up a new world to Raul, and steers him toward applying for community college. Yanez, also born on the border, brings that region to life as he portrays with humor, perception, and compassion what it is like to grow up there, perhaps wishing to never leave." -- Booklist

"Simultaneously charming, funny, heartbreaking and heartwarming, this book skillfully toes the line between the familiar and the distinctive." -- Texas Books in Review

"The El Paso described in these pages is warm and vibrant, and Yanez ushers his young protagonist from adolescence to adulthood with compassion and nuance." -- The Feminist Texican [Reads]