'When You Reach Me' by Rebecca Stead

Stead, Rebecca. (2009). When You Reach Me. New York: Yearling.  ISBN: 9780375850868 (pbk)

Photo by: L. Propes

They say a single butterfly flapping its wings in China can set off events thousands of miles away on the other side of the globe.  In science fiction, there is often a single moment in time -- the flapping of a butterfly's wings, so to speak -- that can change the future, and not always for the better.  Time travel is an oft-used trope in science fiction.  Whether it's the slingshot around the sun employed by Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, Dr. Sam Beckett and his Project Quantum Leap, a British telephone box inhabited by a Time Lord, or a tiny, magical hourglass in Harry Potter, time travel is often used as a way to re-set history or find that tiny moment in time where a single action can send a person's future down one road or another.

Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me is a novel that involves a character who eventually figures out how to manipulate time and space, written in a low fantasy style.  While the concept of time travel forms the underlying plot of the novel, it is primarily a coming-of-age story about Miranda, who lives in New York City with her mother in the late 1970s.  Miranda lives a relatively normal life.  She has her best and oldest friend, Sal.  Things have an order and logic that Miranda finds comforting.  Everything changes the day Marcus punches her friend Sal in the stomach for no particular reason.

As the novel progresses, Miranda makes some new friends in Annemarie and Colin, discovers why Sal has been avoiding her since the incident with Marcus, helps her mother prepare to appear on the television show The $20,000 Pyramid, uncovers the identity of the crazy man that lives on the street corner near her apartment, and learns that things -- and people -- are not always the what they seem.  She even discovers common ground with the girl she dislikes.  Miranda also begins to understand that  that material possessions do not necessarily translate into parental love and affection.

The novel's structure revolves around a letter Miranda is supposed to write to an unnamed person, describing the events of the past several months.  She starts forming the letter in her head, reexamining what has happened to her in the light of a recent revelation, but insists she isn't going to write the letter, until she realizes who asked her to write the letter and why.  The action shifts smoothly from Miranda's present, while she drafts the letter, to the previous months.  Stead's writing effectively mimics the way a person's mind can switch to a new topic at the mention of a specific person or event.  The entire book becomes the process by which Miranda writes the letter and comes to the decision to give it to the right person, as she connects seemingly unrelated events to one another that pinpoint the recipient of the letter.  Stead gives the reader a delayed climax.  What you think might be the climax is only the beginning of the actual climax, which occurs near the end of the novel.

Stead's novel is populated by a cast of characters from the sullen and misunderstood Marcus to the privileged Annemarie and Julia to the patient and tolerant Richard.  The audience sees them through Miranda's eyes, so we see them from the perspective of a twelve year-old girl, discovering who the characters are, beyond their first impression, as Miranda does.  The characters are appropriate for their age and time period.  The children are just reaching an age where they want to test their boundaries, and Stead perfectly captures Miranda's voice as she explores her new-found maturity.  The characters are complex, often tossing off flippant remarks without a thought for the consequences.  Their actions come back to haunt them, and Stead shows them dealing with the ramifications in a realistic manner.  This allows the characters to grow and adapt as their situations change.  The children behave like typical young adolescents.  In one particularly poignant moment,  as Miranda prepares for her new friend Annemarie to come for a sleepover, Miranda's new-found shame at the bedraggled state of the apartment she shares with her mother in relation to the luxurious environment of Annemaries' radiates painfully from the page.

The setting is late 1970s New York, and Stead gives it the tiny details that evoke the era.  The deli where Miranda, Annemarie, and Colin spend their lunch hours, streakers, the odd crazy person on the street corner, and the expressions the children and adults use in their day-to-day lives, capture the image of the 1970s.  The descriptions of Miranda's mother's clothing and hair, and the pervasive presence of shag carpeting also help complete the mental picture of the era.  Younger readers might find themselves amazed at the amount of freedom Miranda and her classmates have to leave campus for lunch and wander unsupervised about the city without so much as a mobile phone on their pocket.

Stead's theory of time travel, as presented in the book, isn't terribly difficult to understand.  Some might have to re-read the theory, as presented by Marcus and Julia a few times, but the visuals Stead uses to illustrate the theory explain it well.  Stead keeps the time-travel element to a minimum, making the book more about  Miranda and how she wrestles with the decision whether or not to write the letter to the mystery person.

Overall, the book begins a bit slowly, but the pace soon picks up and the book races to its conclusion.

The Junior Library Guild has a study guide teachers can use with their classes while reading  When You Reach Me.  It includes cross-curricular lessons, like why the Miranda warning is so important that Miranda's mother named her for it.  Random House also provides a study guide, with several cross-curricular ideas teachers can use.  Teachers can use When You Reach Me as a way to discuss social activism, city planning, the theory of relativity, or as an introduction to Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

Students might also want to read Stead's other novels: Liar and Spy and First Light.  When You Reach Me won the 2010 Newberry Award, in an interesting parallel with A Wrinkle in Time, which also won the Newberry Award in 1963.  So much of this novel was influenced by A Wrinkle in Time, that students might also want to read it, and the other novels of the Time Quintet: A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and An Acceptable Time.

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"Rebecca Stead brilliantly weaves details of setting from memories of her own teen years on the Upper West Side, including a strange individual and her mom's appearance with Dick Clark on The $20,000 Pyramid.  The story's science fiction aspect will not become readily apparent until almost the very end, but it is crucial to the plot.  Reading A Wrinkle in Time is not necessary in order to enjoy the book, but it does make it more fun." -- James Blasingame, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2011

"The first indication that this book is going to get deeply, seductively weird is when broody classmate Marcus engages the heroine, Miranda, in a discussion about a flaw in the logic of A Wrinkle in Time...  Miranda's life is an ordinary round of family and school...  But when her best friend is bizarrely punched by another boy on the street, and when she starts receiving anonymous notes that seem to foretell the future, it's clear that all is not as it seems...  Closing revelations are startling and satisfying but quietly made, their reverberations giving plenty of impetus for the reader to back to the beginning and catch what was missed." -- Roger Sutton, Horn Book Magazine, 2009

"Miranda experiences a lot in sixth grade.  She loses her best friend, her mom goes on a game show, she learns there is a dentist's office inside her school, and she enjoys her first job.  Stead has written a story about a typical 12-year-old girl; although... there is some compelling mystery the reader is hard-pressed to discover.  The best parts of the story are the characters.  There is Miranda herself who is thoughtful and smart, but she doesn't think much of it.  Marcus is a troubled boy but no one really seems to know him.  There are best friends Julia and Annemarie, but their friendship is put to a serious test when Julia acts snobby once too often.  And, there is the mysterious writer of the notes Miranda keep finding... The topics are interesting, and the short chapters keep the pace flowing quickly." -- Shelly Glantz, Library Media Connection, 2009

"Stead's novel is as much about character as story. Miranda's voice rings true with its faltering attempts at maturity and observation. The story builds slowly, emerging naturally from a sturdy premise. As Miranda reminisces, the time sequencing is somewhat challenging, but in an intriguing way. The setting is consistently strong. The stores and even the streets-in Miranda's neighborhood act as physical entities and impact the plot in tangible ways." -- Caitlin Augusta, School Library Journal, 2009

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References:

 Augusta, Caitlin. 2009. When you reach me. School Library Journal 55 (7) (07): 93-, http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2048/login?url=http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2060/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=43415849&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Blasingame, James. 2011. When you reach me. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 54 (6) (03): 461-4, http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2048/login?url=http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2060/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=59423911&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Glantz, Shelley. 2009. When you reach me. Library Media Connection 28 (2) (10): 74-, http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2048/login?url=http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2060/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=44773789&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Sutton, Roger. 2009. When you reach me. Horn Book Magazine 85 (4) (Jul): 432-, http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2048/login?url=http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2060/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=42427896&site=ehost-live&scope=site.