Richie's Picks: WHEN YOU REACH ME by Rebecca Stead, Random House/Wendy
Lamb Books, July 2009, 208p., ISBN: 978-0-385-73742-5; Libr. ISBN:
978-0-385-90664-7
"All good things in all good time." -- Hunter/Garcia
"I check the box under my bed, which is where I've kept your notes these
past few months. There it is, in your tiny handwriting: April 27th; Studio
TV-15, the words all jerky-looking, like you wrote them on the subway.
Your last 'proof.'
"I still think about the letter you asked me to write. It nags at me,
even though you're gone and there's no one to give it to anymore. Sometimes I
work on it in my head, trying to map out the story you asked me to tell,
about everything that happened this past fall and winter. It's all still
there, like a movie I can watch when I want to. Which is never."
As I've written at other points in time, I just love finding a book that I
enjoy so much that I want to immediately read it a second time. What, for
me, is even rarer is finding a book like WHEN YOU REACH ME that I enjoy
even more the second time through. The reason for this is that there is a
lot of foreshadowing to this story and, the second time through I know what
is going to happen and I can watch for all of the little clues that I missed
the first time.
Reading through the second time, coming upon what I had missed, I found
myself thinking about what life would be like if it could be lived like a
book so that you could read it through the first time, find out what happens,
and then go back and live it through a second time being able to watch for
all those clues necessary for avoiding the dangers and mistakes.
"He showed up around the beginning of the school year, when Sal and I
still walked home from school together. A few kids called him Quack, short for
Quackers, or they called him Kicker because he used to do these sudden
kicks into the street, like he was trying to punt one of the cars speeding up
Amsterdam Avenue. Sometimes he shook his fist at the sky and yelled crazy
stuff like 'What's the burn scale? Where's the dome?' and then he threw
his head back and laughed these loud, crazy laughs, so everyone could see
that he had about thirty fillings in his teeth. And he was always on our
corner, sometimes sleeping with his head under the mailbox."
Miranda, the twelve-year-old narrator of WHEN YOU REACH ME, lives with her
mom in an apartment house in New York City in the late 1970s. Miranda has
a healthy obsession with the book A WRINKLE IN TIME. Her mother's
obsession is with becoming a contestant on The $20,000 Pyramid, the television
game show hosted by Dick Clark. There are three puzzles that quickly develop
in WHEN YOU REACH ME: First, there are little snippets of Miranda
referring to mysterious notes she finds in unexpected places that contain
unknowable stuff, and some unexplained letter that she has been asked to write to
some unrevealed person. I didn't figure out what these were all about until
almost the end. There is the mystery of that crazy guy on the corner,
just down from Miranda's apartment building. From where did he suddenly
appear? And then there are all the questions surrounding Marcus, the kid at
school who also knows all about A WRINKLE IN TIME and who, for no apparent
reason, punches out Miranda's lifelong friend and downstairs neighbor -- Sal
-- who then quickly becomes her former lifelong friend.
WHEN YOU REACH ME is fit together so perfectly that -- the second read
through -- I was shaking my head and laughing at least as loud as the crazy
guy on the corner each time I came upon one of the many pieces that author
Rebecca Stead leaves sitting right out there in the open, just begging to be
discovered. It is a book that gives me funny feelings in my stomach and
makes me want to look up and shake my fist at the sky; a book that made me
weep; a book that I will be thinking about for a long, long time.
"'None of it makes sense!' my brain yelled.
"'But all of it is true,' I answered."
I don't want to say anymore, for fear of giving away too much. But I can
predict with confidence -- as if I've been to the future and back again --
that no matter what comes down the pike in the next few months, WHEN YOU
REACH ME will be recognized and remembered as one of the truly great
children's books of 2009.
Richie Partington, MLIS
_http://www.librarything.com/catalog/richiespicks_
(http://www.librarything.com/profile/richiespicks)
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
Moderator, _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/)
_http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks_ (http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks)
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