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#11 When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (2009)
102 points

I sell this to kids in the library by saying it’s a cross between Beverly Clearly and Lost. And I always say “the ending will BLOW YOUR MIND.” Because it does. – Sharon Ozimy

This is a book you can give to any kind of kid with any kind of interest and they will probably like it. Adults too. It’s such a strange but expertly written sci-fi meets mystery meets… something else. It’ll also make you scratch your brain a whole lot thinking about destiny and free-will. – Nicole Johnston

Sometimes, not very often, you pick up a book and read it, and when you finish, you think, This book was whole and complete and beautifully, wonderfully crafted. That’s the experience I had reading When You Reach Me. Not a cliché in sight, just clean, pure prose and a story that takes you by the hand and doesn’t let go till the last word. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to thank the author personally for writing it. – Kate Coombs

Possibly the best-plotted middle-grade book ever written. – Sam Eddington

Why helloooo, little miss I-almost-made-it-to-the-top-ten-children’s-novels-of-all-time!  The last time this book appeared on the Top 100 list I wrote, “There is no way of knowing if When You Reach Me would be this high on the list if it hadn’t just won itself a shiny gold Newbery Medal.  When I redo this poll in ten years, there is a fairly good chance that the book will either disappear entirelly from this list, or crawl even higher in the estimation of folks as more and more people read it.”  Well, it hasn’t been ten years yet, but judging how quickly this book climbed from its original position at #39, things are looking up, don’t you think?

The summary from my original review reads, “It’s the late 70s and the unthinkable has occurred. While walking home, Miranda’s best friend Sal is punched in the stomach for no good reason. After that, he refuses to hang out with Miranda anymore. Forced to make other friends, Miranda befriends the class yukster and a girl who has also recently broken up with her best friend too. But strange things are afoot in the midst of all this. Miranda has started receiving tiny notes with mysterious messages. They say things like ‘I am coming to save your friend’s life and my own’ and ‘You will want proof. 3 p.m. today: Colin’s knapsack.’ Miranda doesn’t know who is writing these things or where they are coming from but it is infinitely clear that the notes know things that no one could know. Small personal things that seem to know what she’s thinking. Now Miranda’s helping her mom study for the $20,000 Pyramid show all the while being driven closer and closer to the moment when it all comes together. When you eliminate the possible all that remains, no matter how extraordinary, is the impossible.”

Originally titled You Are Here (which may explain the image on the cover a bit better), author Rebecca Stead had only previously written the science fiction middle grade novel First Light, before penning this newest book.  In May of 2009 I, being no fool, interviewed Rebecca right quick so as to talk to her about the book.  I asked her where the ideas for the book came from.  She answered, “The ‘big idea’ behind the book w

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Mockingbird
Kathryn Erskine
middle grade/ya

Every once in a while I run across one of those stories with a main character so beyond the bounds of my everyday existence I marvel at how anyone could create her/him and do so in such a believable way.

Erskine has done so with her character, Caitlin. A fifth-grader, Caitlin has Asperger's Syndrome. She's really smart but has a really tough time understanding and expressing emotion. Maneuvering through life means learning an exhausting list of facial expressions that decode what what people are thinking and/or what they really mean. Add to that that the the person who helped her maneuver the world, her older brother, has been killed in a school shooting.

Erskine bites off a huge chunk of storytelling with her character and the external event of a school shooting. She maneuvers both phenomenally. Caitlin is one of the best characters I've read lately. I had no idea what it's like inside the mind of a child with Asperger's. Erskine gives her readers a glance. It's a glance that doesn't pity. It doesn't minimize. It is. As such, I came to both empathize and understand Caitlin. It's a phenomenal bit of writing. Add to it weaving Caitlin's story seamlessly together with the affects of a school shooting on a community and exploring how to find "closure" and this work moves from phenomenal to unforgettable.

The one aspect of this novel that I was less impressed with was that it, like When You Reach Me, relies on an outside piece of art, in this instance To Kill a Mockingbird, to carry part of the story. One day I may do this myself and kick myself for not understanding or for finding fault with this particular writer's tool at present, but when a writer can weave as well as Erskine, story doesn't need outside art to support it, or deepen the emotional resonance. It's already there. And there in spades. For me, bringing in the outside world in this way detracts from the story being told. It pulls me outside Caitlin's story. It also expects a lot from that external art and the reader. I'd hazard a guess that not many children today have seen, To Kill a Mockingbird. Thus, what effect will the film really have on the reader? Wouldn't a fictional film do the job even better by staying within story by being a created part of it?

If you're looking for a deep story about school shootings, how they affect a community, what it must be like to "feel" and perceive the world as a person with Asperger's all wrapped into a story that pulls you toward it in a gentle but insistent way, read Mockingbird. There is so much here. Much to discuss. Critique. Enjoy. Ponder. And grow from.

Read it.

For other great Spring diversions, hop over to Barrie Summy's website. She's got temptations galore!

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When You Reach Me
Rebecca Stead

middle grade

I thought twice about reviewing this book. It's always hard when a piece wins an award to write a review about it. The prejudice that goes along with an award as weighty as the Newbery is that the book is phenomenal.


Only, I had some serious issues with it.

Of course, making such a statement requires serious justification, and let me say that I think the premise--time travel--and the writing are phenomenal. They are what kept me reading.

However, I had some serious problems with the fact that Stead rested her story so significantly on L'Engle's, A Wrinkle in Time. A professor of mine in grad school told us--as a way of more or less taking the burden off our shoulders of coming up with new ideas for term papers and later, our own research--that we should build upon the ideas already out there (upon the shoulders of giants), not think we have to come up with brand new ones. So, I'm all for building upon the idea of time travel that L'Engle entertained in A Wrinkle in Time, which also happens to be one of my all time favorite books.

What I had trouble with in Stead's piece was that she built the whole book around L'Engle's when she didn't really have to. She set the book in the 1970s, made the main character obsessed with L'Engle's book, kept referring to it and debating the time travel issue as L'Engle explained it in her piece. I'm not sure why. Stead took L'Engle's idea and reshaped, built onto it, like many many writers do, and made it something clever and new. So why the need to incorporate A Wrinkle in Time into the very thread of When You Reach Me? The end result was distracting and placed Stead's groundbreaking thoughts and concepts in the very long, very gigantic shadow of L'Engle's own work.

In the end, if you are looking for amazingly good stylistic writing with strong characters, this piece has them. A new idea on time travel? The book has that too. If only it didn't have such a long shadow interwoven within its very fabric.

For more amazing reads, see Barrie Summy's blog this week!

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I have been reading, this week, the books of right now—lauded prizewinners from across multiple categories.  I know bestsellerdom is many a writer's ambition.  I like to read, and I often learn from, books that win a jury's favor. 

Today I read Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, the recent Newberry Medal winner.  It's a book that never once loses its footing in terms of tone—our narrator, Miranda, sounds precisely like the circa-1970s New York City sixth grader that she is.  Steadfast, observant, funny, open-hearted, Miranda loves her single mother and her mother's almost-perfect boyfriend, Richard.  She makes do with her less-than-perfect apartment in a less-than-perfect part of the city.  She had a best friend named Sal, but he's been eluding her.  She's opened herself to new friendships and, perhaps because she's such a devoted fan of Madeleine L'Engle stories, to the alluring idea of time travel. 

When You Reach Me crosses boundaries in inspired, endearing fashion.  It's a time travel mystery, or perhaps a character study, or a mother-daughter story, or a first-love story, or a best friendship story.  It's a story in which Miranda is both entirely real and utterly compassionate—she has qualities that we hope for in all our children.  And the grown-ups in this story are utterly lovable, too—not just Miranda's Mom and Richard, but a traveling dentist, and a school sergeant, and the guy who runs the deli.  There are good people, in other words, all throughout this book, and they're mixed up with something surreally strange.  Through it all, Stead does an outstanding job of making her characters feel real and near to us.  We want them to join us for dinner.

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Why, I wonder, am I so compelled to write about my reading life? I suppose it has something to do with memory, with holding on to things (we recall best those things which we have narrated, as Charlotte Mason was astute enough to recognize), and also with the way putting thoughts into words, written words, shifts vague and swirling impressions to coherent observations, connections, understanding.

Then, too, the urge to talk (write) about books springs also from booklover’s enthusiasm: when I’ve enjoyed something, or even just parts of something, I am eager, eager, eager to share. This creates all sorts of readerly, writerly dilemmas for me: sometimes I start conversations that I can’t squeeze out time to finish (though, in my mind, they are never finished, never closed; and I’m always figuring I’ll have a chance to chime in at some point). Sometimes I want to talk about books that I mostly loved, but I had this one quibble with a plot point, or I thought the ending was weak, or the first-person narrative voice was an unfortunate choice, or—well, any critical observations at all, and if the author is a living person, I find myself completely paralyzed at the prospect of putting my criticism in print. (Which is why, of course, I’m not a book reviewer by trade.)

Then, of course, there’s the spoiler problem, over which I’ve sweated here before. For example, I want to tell you all about how much I enjoyed Rebecca Stead’s excellent middle-grade novel, When You Reach Me—but if I say anything, practically anything at all, I’ll give away things I’d rather you discovered yourself in the pages of the book, in the perfect way Stead has chosen to reveal them to you. I can say that it’s about a girl who reads A Wrinkle in Time repeatedly, constantly; that her best friend, a boy, abruptly withdraws from her; that her mother is a single, working mom hoping for a chance to shine on $20,000 Pyramid; that it’s 1979; that there’s a mystery; that there are characters I will never forget, completely fresh, completely believable; that I haven’t read a novel that nails the flavor of New York City so perfectly since, gosh, Harriet the Spy. But none of that tells you what I loved most about the book, or what makes it sing, or why I won’t soon forget it. I can’t tell you those things until you’ve read it—and then you won’t need me to, because you’ll know too.

Or how about The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly? I loved it: this funny, tangy tale of an eleven-year-old girl, surrounded by brothers on a Texas pecan farm in 1899, with a mother yearning for a girly-girl, a fascination with the critters whose doings she records in her very important notebook, and an aloof, bewhiskered grandfather who has never, until now, seemed to notice her existence? I was delighted by the way Callie and her grandfather become acquainted with one another via their mutual interest in the natural world—he’s a correspondent of Charles Darwin and an amateur naturalist and scientist, ever on the lookout for a new species of flora or fauna that might add his name to the rolls of the distinguished discoverers of the day. At first he reacts to Callie rather as if she’s a curious new species herself, and the feeling is mutual. Slowly, they bond…oh, I loved it, the slow revelation of kindred spirits. And meanwhile, there are family antics, and wondrous new technology coming to town (a telegraph! an automobile!), and Callie has to figure out how to carve out time for her burning interests when the womenfolk in her life demand piano practice and embroidery and cookery lessons. Certainly there have been many books tackling a girl’s struggles to define and defend her own identity as the people around her seem determined to squeeze her into a mold she isn’t sure fits—I’ve worked with that theme myself, in my Martha books—but I don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone quite like Miss Calpurnia Tate. It’s the setting, the context, that sold me on this book: I’d place it with The Great Brain and Ginger Pye on my mental bookshelf: episodic, comical, historically delicious novels full of eccentric and lovable characters, with that something extra that sets them apart from the crowd.

And I’ve ten times written and deleted a sentence of criticism about one of these two novels, which my what-if-I-hurt-the-writer’s-feelings cowardice will not allow me to keep intact. How’s that for some obnoxious ambiguity?

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I sat in the car while my son was at his piano lesson, finishing When You Reach Me. It was beautiful. I have to confess, I can over-hype books (how can't you when you've connected with something amazing?), so I'm going to hold back and leave it there.

There is another obvious comparison. Those who've read it I'm sure saw it, too. I don't want to come out and say which book some of the circumstances mirror because the title alone will give a big chunk of When You Reach Me's plot away. Let's just say it was recently made into a movie. TTW. That's as much as you'll get.

Okay, one more thing. I can't just leave it there. Those of you who read know that Miranda, the main character, carries around a copy of A Wrinkle in Time. Was I the only kid in America not to enjoy this book?

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Let’s say there were an eighth continent, which I will call Boodooshia. If there were a bunch of books about Boodooshia, almost all of which showed the majority of Boodooshians to be stupid and cruel, and in various ways exposing how awful things were in Boodooshia, I suspect there would be a reaction to the relentlessly negative portraits of these people… especially if none of the authors had been to Boodooshia and none of them agreed on exactly what Boodooshia was like, except for its horridness.

And yet, this is pretty much what we have with most of our collective effort to write about the future. The slope we slide down varies from author to author, but in almost all, the future is horrible. What’s more, the future is simple — often totalitarian governments presiding over vast territories where resources are scarce and populated by scared, even savage, people. Such is the world Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, the first in a series which features such a future world and a to-the-death Survivor like reality TV show. It’s a big hit and rightly so, an entertaining read with memorable characters and good suspense and action. However, its vision of the future is a common one in fiction.

I could go on and on about it, and ponder how those unceasing visions of a dreadful futures and totalitarian governments seem to be tied to the inability to do well meaning things like crack down on traffic safety or insure poor children or stem back pollution, but I won’t go on and on about it.

However, another big hit this summer is also about the future, even though it’s set in the late 1970s: Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me (which I’ve got down as an early favorite to winning the Newbery medal next year). In many ways, When You Reach Me is the sort of “quiet book” they aren’t supposed to publish any more, but there is a perplexing puzzle at the center that involves the future. Practically nothing is said about it, and yet the events of the book and the fates of its characters are bound up with the future. To put it as simply as possible, there is a quieter determination that simple application of humanity to the way we live our lives will make all the difference. And for all the fun of The Hunger Games, I feel like that’s what needs to be said.

To return to my trope of Boodooshia, Rebecca Stead is willing to put a note in a bottle and cast it out toward the mysterious continent, and is watching the sea for a return message.

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If you're anything like me, you've already heard about a million great recommendations for Rebecca Stead's WHEN YOU REACH ME, and that can be a bit of a double-edged sword.  The great reviews made me really, REALLY want to read the book, but they also set up what I worried might be unrealistic expectations.  Could it really be THAT amazing?

It could.  And it is.

These young characters, growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, are reminiscent of Judy Blume's families in TALES OF FOURTH GRADE NOTHING and the FUDGE series. They're authentic, multi-faceted, funny, and real.  Their story of friendship and first crushes and first jobs would have been enough to win me over. But then the letter comes. When main character Miranda reads it, she she learns that a mysterious someone says he or she is coming to save her friend's life, and the story evolves from a coming of age tale into a mystery/science fiction, genre-bending marvel. At the heart of WHEN YOU REACH ME is a thread about time travel -- the possibilities, the what-if and the how-might-we, and the sheer wonder of believing.  When I finished, I wanted to pick it up immediately and start reading all over again.

This is going to be the first book that I share with my middle school students as a read-aloud in the fall. I absolutely, positively can't wait.

Editing to add: I loaned my copy of WHEN YOU REACH ME to marjorielight , who has also posted a recommendation today. Hers is longer and way more detailed because she is like that and also makes fancy little place cards when you go to her house for dinner.  You can read her thoughts here.

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