When You Reach Me | Rebecca Stead | When you reach me-reached me!

When You Reach Me | Rebecca Stead | It took my breath away

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Dropping in with A... Nutramax Laborator... Manhattan Murder M... Black Belt Communi... When You Reach Me

	When You Reach Me Rebecca Stead Wendy Lamb Books, 2009 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 93 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Winner of the 2010 John Newbery Medal

Four mysterious letters change Miranda?s world forever.

By sixth grade, Miranda and her best friend, Sal, know how to navigate their New York City neighborhood. They know where it?s safe to go, like the local grocery store, and they know whom to avoid, like the crazy guy on the corner.

But things start to unravel. Sal gets punched by a new kid for what seems like no reason, and he shuts Miranda out of his life. The apartment key that Miranda?s mom keeps hidden for emergencies is stolen. And then Miranda finds a mysterious note scrawled on a tiny slip of paper:

I am coming to save your friend?s life, and my own.
I must ask two favors. First, you must write me a letter.

The notes keep coming, and Miranda slowly realizes that whoever is leaving them knows all about her, including things that have not even happened yet. Each message brings her closer to believing that only she can prevent a tragic death. Until the final note makes her think she?s too late.

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When you reach me-reached me!

this book really made me think. it reached out and really pulled me in. it was a touching story about friendship and also had a thought-provoking plot. i highly recomend when you reach me.

It took my breath away

This book is the most sensitive book I have read in a long time. The writing is graceful, even poetic at times.

This book deals gently with some difficult topics - class and race differences, safety in a city, a single parent in a relationship - without being an "issue" book. These many things swirl around main character Miranda's life just as they swirl around the lives of children.

The book also deals with the loss of someone's friendship with a true depth of knowing. When reading this book, I was reminded of the profound sense of loss one feels as a young person coexisting in school with someone who used to be a friend.

Yet with all its sensitivity, this book is an action packed, fantasy page turner. Even after I finished, I couldn't put it down - I had to go back and begin all over again.

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Compelling Mystery, Friendship, and Redemption: When You Reach Me

Miranda--the protagonist of the 2010 Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me--is a twelve-year-old latchkey kid living with her single mom in New York City in the 1970s. She's smart, she's funny, and she reads only one book: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Her mother--a would-be lawyer with a keen sense of justice--was forced to drop out of law school when she had Miranda. Now she works unhappily as a paralegal and dreams of winning the game show The $20,000 Pyramid so she can quit her job.

Miranda has lost her best friend, Sal, who lives in her apartment building. One day, while the two of them were walking home from school, a neighborhood kid named Marcus punched Sal, and from that day on Sal just seemed to drift away: he no longer waits to walk with Miranda, and he refuses even to look at her when they bump into each other. In the confusing void left by Sal, Miranda strikes up new friendships with Annemarie--who was recently ditched by her sometimes-snotty best friend Julia--and Colin, "this short kid who seemed to end up in my class every year" (p. 54). The three of them get lunchtime jobs together at the local sandwich shop, Jimmy's, and bond over cheese sandwiches with smelly pickles.

One day Miranda finds her apartment mysteriously unlocked after school, and the spare key missing from its hiding spot, unnerving both her and her mother. Shortly thereafter Miranda receives the following mysterious note:

"This is hard. Harder than I expected, even with your help. But I have been practicing, and my preparations go well. I am coming to save your friend's life, and my own. I ask two favors. First, you must write me a letter. Second, please remember to mention the location of your house key. The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you" (p. 60).

Miranda continues to receive notes like this--four in all--each as eerie and enigmatic as the first. The notes set her a mystery to unravel: Who is sending the notes? What kind of trip is the sender planning to take? Which of Miranda's friends will be saved? And from what? And what's with that crazy homeless guy on the corner that sleeps with his head under the mailbox? These questions, along with the rift between Miranda and Sal, drive the story forward.

Many things make this book appealing. The first, of course, is the mystery: the reader is as intent on solving it as Miranda is. Stead gives the mystery depth beyond the mere content of the notes by lacing the book with the science fiction theme of time travel. The most obvious way this theme shows up is in conversations Miranda has with certain friends--in particular Marcus, a math and physics prodigy who thinks time travel is theoretically possible. However, time travel is also woven into the book via Miranda's attachment to L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, a book in which the protagonist, Meg, travels through time to save her family members. (Incidentally, Stead says in the acknowledgements that L'Engle's books captivated her as a child.)

Despite the compelling mystery, though, When You Reach Me is most deeply about friendship. Specifically, the novel addresses the question of how to hold on to old friendships without stifling them, and it insightfully brings out the stabilizing effect that new friendships can have in the effort to preserve or reclaim old ones. Though I refrain from specifics here in order not to spoil the plot, the novel's narrative reflections on friendship are extremely thoughtful and resonant. This theme of friendship will speak deeply to tweens navigating the frequently tumultuous social world of middle school.

The book is also just very clever. For example, as I already noted, Miranda's mother wants to win on The $20,000 Pyramid. The final part of the game show is called the "Winner's Circle", in which a set of objects is described to the contestant and she is required to say what category the objects belong to. For example, if the objects were "a tube of toothpaste, someone's hand" the contestant would say "things you squeeze" (p. 39). Stead cleverly titles most of the chapters in the book with categories like that, such as "Things You Keep in a Box," "Things That Go Missing," and "Things You Hide." And sure enough, Stead puts objects in each chapter that fit into these titular categories. After a while, it became a fun extra game to find what the "things that smell" or "things that kick" were in the chapter I was reading!

In addition to these factors that give When You Reach Me subjective appeal, the book is developmentally valuable for young readers. In particular, the book communicates hopeful positive messages about some of life's most important themes. Indeed, it seems to be part of Stead's explicit purpose to lift, for a moment, the "veil" that generally hides from us "the world as it really is," in all its "beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love" (p. 71). In other words, part of Stead's aim is to inspire truthful but hopeful reflection on some of the things that matter most in life.

Stead's elevation of the value of friendship is perhaps the most important and striking example of what makes this book good for tweens. Her focus on the deep importance of friendship is a welcome counter-weight to the catty, superficial social culture typical of middle school.

The possibility of redemption is another developmentally valuable theme that Stead explores in the novel. For example, the book builds toward second chances for Miranda's mother--both vocationally, and relationally. Similarly, Miranda has a redemptive conversion in the way she views and treats her classmates Julia and Alice Evans. Whereas before she viewed Julia simply as a competitor for Annemarie's affection, and Alice as the weird kid who waited too long to go to the bathroom, toward the end of the book Miranda's veil is suddenly removed, revealing Julia as Annemarie's faithful friend, and Alice as an insecure outsider. This insight gives Miranda new compassion and kindness toward both of them.

In sum, When You Reach Me is a fantastic book for children aged nine years and up. Not only does it engage interesting themes bundled into a compelling mystery, but it elevates friendship and redemption, and thereby encourages the right sort of values in tweens.

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My daughter recommended that I would enjoy this

I originally got this book for my 12-year old daughter, after hearing it recommended on KUOW's Book Reviews by Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl (the subject was Mysteries). Her class was covering the Mystery genre in Language Arts, and as we are both BIG fans of Madeline L'Engle (the main character constantly re-reads "A Wrinkle in Time"), I thought she might enjoy it. I was a little hesitant, given many of the reviews who didn't like the book... particularly those who said that they never finished it because they found the first half rather confusing. Because the person recommending it was a a young girl, however, I went ahead and bought it.

My daughter really enjoyed the book, and then it turned up on the recommended reading list for her school. She told me that she thought I would enjoy it too, and then kept asking me if I had read the book. I asked her what she thought about the people who said that the book was too confusing, and she said that she could see where people might think that, but that it was worth hanging in to the end. She was right.

It is a sort of "coming of age" book (for 12-year olds), with "big revelations" that others may find too pat and easy. But it is a quiet book, for thougthful kids who are trying to navigate their way through the 'tweens. It addresses the frustrations and discomforts of change... of old relationships, and developing new ones... in ways that many kids can relate. Miranda has a falling out with her best friend since pre-school, Sal. In "losing" him, she learns to forge new relationships with other classmates, and learns that people are not always what you think; that if you scratch a little below your surface impressions, they may surprise you. As she helps her mother prepare for an appearance on "The 20,000 Pyramid," she also must solve a puzzle that could save two people's lives.

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Read A Wrinkle in Time Instead

While I applaud this author for using such a brilliant book as a base for her own story, this has too much Wrinkle in it and not enough originality. The child characters aren't as interesting as the adult characters (I found myself wanting to know more about the mother rather than the daughter), and children will probably struggle with the time travel concepts. An interesting, fast read, but it just doesn't measure up to past Newbery medalists.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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