Sunday, June 26, 2011

Book #81: When You Reach Me

When You Reach Me (Stead, Rebecca)Title: When You Reach Me
Author: Rebecca Stead

I've been interested in reading When You Reach Me since I picked it up in Chris Crowe's YA Novel class last fall, but I decided I was too busy to read it just then. Annie took it out of the library a few weeks ago and it was lying around after she finished it on our vacation, so I decided to read it on our plane ride home this morning. It's a quick read. I zipped through it between Minneapolis and Denver. It's also an interesting read-- twelve-year-old Miranda lives in NYC in 1979. She's obsessed with Madeline l'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (which you sort of have to read through the lines a little bit to get if you're not familiar with the book-- I haven't read it in a quarter of a century and didn't get the references for a while). In fact, I'd probably call When You Reach Me an homage to A Wrinkle in Time, since it too deals with time travel. Miranda is a preteen, dealing with normal preteen things (her best friend has abandoned her, she's trying to navigate the social world of sixth grade, her mom feels ambivalent about marrying the fantastic boyfriend), but shortly after the story unfolds she starts finding mysterious notes that show her that her obsession with A Wrinkle in Time and with time travel might be more than just fantasy. Annie loved this book and I liked it too-- the characters were all fun and interesting and it was just deep enough without requiring a physics textbook to understand the science of it.

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