Christian-phobic people can enjoy this book too; it never overtly mentions being Christian. It's a tribute to Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time, though, and when Christians consider the plot...
Title: When You Reach Me
Author: Rebecca Stead
Date: 2009
Publisher: Yearling
ISBN: 978-0-375-85086-8
Length: 197 pages
Quote: "I don't call him anything, but I think of him as the laughing man."
The series that began with A Wrinkle in Time is complete. Nobody else can add anything to it. The L'Engle fiction universe, which spanned from the trashy materialism of the 1920s to the New Age movement of the 1980s to natural science, music, and the liberal heritage of the Christian Church, was the creation of one brilliant mnd that blazed for more than sixty years. Now it's gone.
It left, however, at least one piece of fanfiction worthy of the oeuvre. And of its very own Newbery Award.
In this novel by, about, and for fans of A Wrinkle in Time, Miranda is not a genius like Meg. The year is 1979. Book-loving middle-schoolers are starting to discover Wrinkle in school libraries but may not yet have created enough demand for those libraries to acquire A Wind in the Door. (I read it in 1978. Miranda doesn't seem to have read it yet.) Miranda and her mother watch television. Because her mother has lots of red hair she can fling dramatically about when leaping with joy, she's been selected to appear on a game show that was popular in 1979 (revived on the Game Show Network, btw). They spend evenings practicing for the show, answering very simple questions very fast. There are no astrophysicists in the family.
So Miranda has school friends., Sal is starting to get some hassles form other boys about his best buddy being a girl. Especially Sal feels hassled by Marcus. Miranda's second-best pal, Annemarie, has another friend, Julia, whom Miranda has never liked. In this story Julia's most aggressive act is flipping a rubber band, but she's an annoying little rich girl who complains because construction paper does not come in the exact color of her skin, which she knows is "60% cacao Swiss chocolate," because she's been taken to Switzerland.
Funny things have happened in their relatively quiet New York City neighborhood, lately. A phantom streaker? Streaking peaked in 1973; fads die fast in New York. Miranda gets strange anonymous notes from someone who seems to know the future. An old man with obvious mental problems has started hanging out on their block, lying with his head under a mailbox.
Annoying Marcus has read Wrinkle, too, and shows off by criticizing it: If Meg, Calvin, Charles Wallace, and their father landed in the broccoli patch five minutes before they left, wouldn't they have seen something before they left? Annoying Julia has an answer to that, which puts her conversation with Marcus over Sal's and Miranda's heads. How utterly annoying of them.
How it all comes together to form a story might be a little too perfectly sweet for L'Engle's taste, but it should be accessible to middle grade readers. It's a fast, fun read for adults, too.
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