This startlingly beautiful and exotic story has to do with one of the most wondrous and frightening things in the world: growing up. Such simple words for such a complex, weighty, never-ending process. It carries with it the realization of responsibilities, the maddening loss of one kind of security and the sometimes-reluctant gain of another, and so much isolation. "New Olympus" is undoubtedly about a good deal more than the loss of one's childhood. Cross's stories, his visions of life, are as complex as the finest poetry and similarly leave the reader with singular, recognizable, yet hard-to-define feelings. This one left us feeling awash in admiration.