When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

I try pretty hard to only review adult books on the Blogulator, because I feel relatively certain that that is what people expect to read about here, but truthfully I read a lot more young adult books. Like, A LOT more. But I tend not to read middle grade, which is book industry speak for books written for an audience of about 8-12. Still, lately I've been hearing great buzz about When You Reach Me; it's considered the front runner for the Newbury Prize, which is very prestigious, so I picked it up yesterday and stayed up late finishing it. It was very, very good.

The protagonist of When You Reach Me is twelve-year-old Miranda, a bookish latchkey kid living on New York's Upper West Side in the late 1970s. Her life is pretty ordinary, and populated by only a few important people--her mom, her mom's boyfriend Richard, her best friend Sal and his mother. Then, all of a sudden, a few things happen that change her life. A homeless guy Miranda takes to calling "the laughing man" starts spending time on her corner, where even though he seems harmless he still scares Miranda. Sal gets punched by another boy for seemingly no reason and stop speaking to Miranda, also for no reason. And Miranda begins receiving mysterious notes from an unnamed person, who predicts upcoming events in Miranda's life.

The touchstone of When You Reach Me is one of my all-time favorite novels, Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time. Like A Wrinkle In Time, When You Reach Me is a sophisticated novel that unfolds in a seemingly effortless way. The big debate amongst the people I know who've read it right now is, "Will kids like it?" because it is so sophisticated. And not to say that kids can't be sophisticated readers, because they can--after all, A Wrinkle In Time is a favorite of lots of kids, and it's sophisticated and complex and beautifully written. But nowadays, what with the Spongebob Squarepants generation maturing into The Clique novels, it's sometimes hard to imagine where smart books fit in to the entertainment landscape of today's middle grader. Which is really too bad.

While When You Reach Me seems effortless, it's quite obviously not when you take a look at the stitching. It takes a ton of work to create a novel that's this restrained and focused. There is not a single scene out of place here, nothing that, in the end, you don't believe was necessary or belonged. The words are chosen carefully, and the language is very precise, tailored to the voice of the character. There's no insincere kid talk mucking things up, but it sounds age appropriate.

There's also the fact that, though When You Reach Me takes place in 1978/1979, aside from a few tip-offs (The $20,000 Pyramid, for example, which plays a not insignificant part in the story) there is no reason not to believe it could take place right now. This isn't because it fails to conjure up the '70s, but rather that the author's attempt to make the story cross-generational and timeless actually works. But perhaps the book's greatest accomplishment is that it takes a fairly melodramatic premise (When You Reach Me is probably the only book I know of where to tell you the premise would be a giant SPOILER) and allows it to come to fruition without seeming too hysterical, and without letting it overwhelm what truly makes the book special--its characters.

Miranda is a perfectly wrought twelve-year-old, as are most of her peers in the novel (only Marcus--and maybe Julia--veers into the realm of quasi-unbelievable, but Stead makes it clear from almost his first appearance that there is something more about him that Miranda finds unusual just as the reader does), and she matures steadily and gracefully over the course of the story--which is actually not that much time, but is perfectly acceptable in context.

This novel, like many, is about discovery--mostly, making your own discoveries about people you look at every day but don't really see. Stead pushes Miranda past the veil that obfuscates the world--its triumphs and its tragedies, its hope and its horror--and asks her the $65,000 question: "What are you going to do now?"

This entry was posted by OHD, on Sunday, September 13, 2009. You can leave your response.