An anonymous note sender gives Miranda a puzzling task: to write a detailed letter about events that have not yet happened. It is 1978; twelve-year old Miranda is a latchkey child who lives in a grotty New York apartment with her single mother. Miranda tells her story as it unfolds over half a year, speaking directly to the mysterious note dropper. The book is full of mysteries big and small: why does her best friend Sal no longer like her? why does Marcus punch Sal? what is the crazy man on the corner doing? will Miranda’s mother win on the $20,000 Pyramid? and most importantly, who is this person who seems to know all about Miranda’s future?
Rebecca Stead’s novel grabbed me from the moment I learned that Miranda carries around a worn copy of A Wrinkle in Time, which she has read hundreds of times. It seems only fitting that Stead’s Newbery award winner would pay tribute to Madeleine L’Engle’s classic Newbery winner from 1963. And Miranda doesn’t just reread the novel; she tells the story to Belle, who runs the grocery store, and discusses its physics with her schoolmate Marcus. And yet the mention of L’Engle’s novel also makes me conscious of the difference between L’Engle’s book and this one: the prose. My memory of L’Engle’s novel is, among other things, the memory of particular words and phrases (“There is such a thing as a tesseract”). L’Engle’s third-person prose has a dignity to it which is hard to find in Stead’s novel, filled as it is with all the markers of “genuine speech”: the incomplete sentences, the weak qualifiers (“slightly,” “mostly,”“kind of”). Sometimes, in spite of the prose, there are wonderful sentiments, as when Miranda describes those moments when the individual can truly perceive the world around her (with some homage, it seems, to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians—“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face”—but divested of religious significance):
“But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to” (71).
At the book’s climax, though, Stead does make the decision, which I think works, to describe what happens in the form of a list. This form builds tension, and seems to fit with Miranda’s desire to narrate carefully, step by step, what happened on the book’s fateful day.
When You Reach Me is a smart coming-of-age novel that is more about finding friendship than finding love. Stead should be commended for populating Miranda’s world with interesting secondary characters in Miranda’s peers. Sal, Annemarie, Marcus, Julia: Stead carves them well enough to take them beyond the usual “friends of the main character” category. Stead does the same with place. The sixth- grade students in the novel are working on a miniature city, which becomes a symbol for Stead’s own creation here: Belle’s grocery store, the parking garage where the tough guys hang out, Jimmy’s sandwich place, Annemarie’s apartment, even the corner mailbox that the homeless man sleeps under. Even those of us who don’t live in New York City can imagine walking these streets on Manhattan’s West Side.
Stead’s novel is worth reading more than once—it’s central mystery proves chilling and poignant. Adult readers might sniff out an allusion to Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003). We all might be encouraged to pick up A Wrinkle in Time. It’s time to search for my own well-loved copy of that novel, and give it another read.
Worth buying? Yes!
Awards: Newbery Award (2010)
Publication Information: Stead, Rebecca. When You Reach Me. New York: Random, 2009. 197pp.
Mateo's Review
Genre: Mystery
Rating: 4 out of 5
This book is about a girl named Miranda. Her mother receives a letter from the quiz show “The $20,000 Pyramid,” stating that she is going to be one of the contestants. Her friend Sal gets punched in the stomach for no reason and he stops playing with Miranda. The kid who punched him, Marcus, starts being Miranda’s friend. And now she starts receiving notes from a mysterious person.
You would like this book if you:
- · are patient
- · like mysteries
- · like suspense
- · can wait long periods of time with no important things happening.
