things you read again.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Review written for ADD-afflicted folks: This is a Newbery Award winning YA novel about a twelve-year-old girl in New York City. It encompasses Madeleine L'Engle, sandwich shops, losing friends, being punched in the face, gaining friends, racism, the 20,000 dollar Pyramid, divorce, two-dollar bills and kind dentists, along with a lot of other stuff I just won't mention. It's touching, it's funny, it's 200 pages of perfect.

Wanna hear me blather more praise? Read on: When I was a kid, I told people that my greatest dream in life was to win a Newbery award. And then a Pulitzer. I wanted to win both, and if I could win both at once, all the better. For as long as I can remember, I associated the Newbery award with the best sorts of books. The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Maniac McGee, Holes, Walk Two Moons, The Giver, Dear Mr. Henshaw... these were the books that not only made me into a better reader, but gave me something real to think about, not just a place to escape to. And When You Reach Me is perfect company for these books. It's a book of simple pleasures shadowed with complexity - Stead set Miranda up in 1979, away from cell phones, the internet, video game systems and everything that comes with them. Instead, Miranda reads for fun. She hangs out with her friends and listens to records. And the puzzle that sets the twisty little narrative in motion is all the more exciting.

Plot: Miranda, 12, lives with her mother in New York City. She's a latchkey kid, but she hates the term. Her mom is a paralegal and has dated a lawyer in the firm, Richard, for years. Miranda has a best friend in the apartment below hers named Sal - but one day he gets punched in the face for no reason, and everything changes. Sal won't talk to her, her Mom is chosen as a contestant for the 20,000 dollar Pyramid with Dick Clark, and she starts finding mysterious messages, addressed to her, that scare her.

And, just a little bit more: When I finished this book on the J-Church line heading home, I missed my stop. By a lot. I didn't even notice after I had put the book in my lap because I was looking into that middle distance between the novel you just read and the real world - that sort of fuzzy in between where the curtain is finally being rushed across the stage and you realize that none of this actually happened. The puzzle that this book sets up is only half the joy in reading it - in fact, some readers will probably guess at it before the book is through. The other half is Miranda's relationships, of course, and the way that quiet, slow understanding of how friends are made and kept and how life can be now that she understands a small fraction more than she did than when the book started. That "lifting of the veil" (to cop a line from the novel) is between every line, after every chapter marker. And that's probably why this book won its award.

Should you read it? Yes. Go get it.