When You Reach Me facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
When You Reach Me

First edition cover
Author	Rebecca Stead
Cover artist	Sophie Blackall
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Young Adult, Science fiction and mystery
Publisher	Wendy Lamb Books
Publication date	July 14, 2009
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	208 pp
ISBN	978-0-385-73742-5
LC Class	PZ7.S80857 WH 2009

When You Reach Me is a Newbery Medal-winning science fiction and mystery novel by Rebecca Stead, published in 2009. It takes place on the Upper West Side of New York during 1978 and 1979 and follows the protagonist, Miranda Sinclair. She receives a strange note asking her to record future events and write down to the location of her spare key. As the novel progresses, Miranda receives three more notes with requests. The novel contains three story lines — the appearance of Miranda's mom on the game show, The $20,000 Pyramid, Miranda's best friend Sal suddenly not talking with Miranda, and the appearance of a laughing man. Central themes in the novel include independence, redemption and friendship. Stead also wanted to demonstrate the possibilities that she saw in time travel. The author hoped to show her children what New York was like in her childhood, and demonstrate how in an earlier time children were more independent.

When You Reach Me was inspired by a man suffering from amnesia, and by parts of her childhood and her favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time. After completing much of the novel, Stead gave the draft to her editor, Wendy Lamb, who liked it. They expanded on the initial concepts and published When You Reach Me on July 14, 2009, under Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House. The book was well received by critics, who praised its realistic setting and the author's deft handling of small details. The novel has reached the best-seller lists of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today. In addition to receiving the 2010 Newbery Medal, When You Reach Me won several Best Book of the Year awards.

Plot Summary

When You Reach Me follows a sixth-grade protagonist, a girl named Miranda. She lives with her single mother who has a kindhearted boyfriend, Richard. Miranda's best friend Sal, whom she has known since she was a small child, had recently started ignoring Miranda after he had been punched in the stomach by another boy named Marcus.

A homeless man lives on the corner of Miranda's street. She calls him the "laughing man" for his tendency to laugh without cause. Miranda notices that he always utters the words "book bag pocket shoe." She later realizes the phrase refers to the order and place he will send Miranda notes—her library book, a bread bag, her coat pocket and Richard's shoe. The first three notes instruct Miranda to write a letter describing the future events. The notes, whose writer claims to be coming to Miranda's time to save a life, offer three signs of the truth of the messages. As the plot develops, the proofs come true, and Miranda is intrigued.

Miranda and her new friends, Annemarie and Colin find a sandwich shop on the corner, wondering if they can get a job there. The owner, Jimmy, agrees, but he does not wish to pay them with money; instead he gives them a free pop and a sandwich each day. Miranda, Annemarie, and Colin discover a Fred Flintstone bank in the back of sandwich shop. Colin, wanting to see more of the bank, is pulled way by Annemarie insisting that Jimmy could find them. There is a bank robbery that night. The next day, Jimmy fires the three workers, thinking that one of them stole from the Flintstone bank, when the laughing man actually stole it. The workers write a card, give it to Jimmy and insist that they did not steal from the bank. Jimmy believes them and again lets them work at the sandwich shop. He then tells them that he figured out who stole the bank. He thinks that it is Julia, a classmate in their class, and a best friend to Annemarie. He thinks she did it because she is African American. This upsets Annemarie greatly and she immediately quits her job.

At school, Julia starts shouting at Miranda for letting Annemarie drink soda and eat sandwiches, saying that because Annemarie is epileptic she has to eat a special diet. Miranda explains that she didn't know that. Colin is later hanging out with Sal. Colin then asks Miranda if she wants to hang out. Miranda declines, saying that her mom is sick. Later on, someone taps on her door which scares her because she doesn't know anyone that knocks like that. She looks through the peep hole and sees Colin. She opens the door and he looks at her then kisses her. She then kisses him back. Colin smiles and then runs off.

In a later scene, Marcus encounters Sal. Marcus wants to apologize for his misbehavior, and chases Sal when he flees. Sal runs onto a street right ahead of an oncoming truck. Before the truck can hit Sal, the laughing man kicks Sal out of the way, sacrificing his own life for Sal's. Miranda finds the fourth note in Richard's shoe and learns that the laughing man came from the future to save Sal's life. The note asks Miranda to prepare a chronicle of recent events and deliver it by hand, but she does not know whom to give it to.

Miranda's mom is invited to appear on the $20,000 Pyramid. In hopes of winning the money and having a better life, Miranda and her mom's boyfriend Richard prep her for the show. Miranda and Sal are friends again. While her mother is on-stage, Miranda reminisces about a conversation with Marcus about how no one would recognize a time-traveler from a different age. She suddenly realizes that the laughing man is an older incarnation of Marcus, who has come from the future to save Sal's life. He needed to deliver the notes to the young Marcus through Miranda. Later on Miranda goes to the mailbox the laughing man (Marcus) slept under, where she finds a picture of an older version of Julia smiling happily. The novel ends as Miranda reflects on the events in an epilogue.

Genres

When You Reach Me is classified in the science fiction and mystery genres, but includes features of some other genres. Monica Edinger of The New York Times found When You Reach Me to be "a hybrid of genres, it is a complex mystery, a work of historical fiction, a school story and one of friendship, with a leitmotif of time travel running through it." Augusta Scattergood of the Christian Science Monitor wondered, "Is When You Reach Me science fiction? Time travel? A highly imaginative girl's completely conceived experience? Maybe it's historical fiction. After all, it is set in 1979." According to Mary Quattlebaum of The Washington Post, the novel is of the science fiction and time travel genres. Quattlebaum found that, unlike the usual time travel stories, When You Reach Me does not involve "cheesy time travel machines and rock-'em-sock-'em action [but instead] far surpasses the usual whodunit or sci-fi adventure to become an incandescent exploration of 'life, death, and the beauty of it all.' " Both Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly found that despite the book's science-fiction devices, the setting was still "firmly rooted in reality."

Some reviewers have placed parts of the novel in the mystery genre. Edinger found that, despite the broad genres, the novel is mainly "a thrilling puzzle". She relates the pieces slowly; clues are found in the story itself, on the map, in words and chapter titles. At the end of the book everything is tied together and makes sense. Ann Crewdson of School Library Journal found that each note Miranda receives foreshadows the next event. Each note is "skillfully" integrated into the novel, along with subsequent clues, until the climax is reached and all the clues come together. Stead's editor Lamb agreed with the mystery genre, in that "there's plenty to wonder about after you finish the book. Just as we wonder why our feelings change so suddenly, or why someone like the laughing man appears on the corner one day." Gurdon of The Wall Street Journal concurred with Lamb, adding that although the novel is clearly a mystery, the mystery itself is not revealed until the end where the last note comes and where everything ties together.

Themes

Aaron Mead found that, "the novel addresses the question of how to hold on to old friendships without stifling them, and it insightfully brings out the stabilizing effect that new friendships can have in the effort to preserve or reclaim old ones". He noted that the novel deeply helps children in middle school. Crewdson opined that the book deals with the "intricacies of friendship".

This theme of friendship is explored when Sal abandons his friendship with Miranda after Marcus hits him. Elli Housden of The Courier-Mail found that Miranda is forced to deal with the fact that Sal seemingly abandons their friendship and ignores her for no apparent reason. Scattergood considered the novel an "ordinary friendship story" with Sal ignoring Miranda to find other friends. Julie Long from Reading Time noted how the incident forces Miranda to find new friends and become more active in school, where she starts learning the dynamics of that environment.

Mead noted that "the book builds toward second chances for Miranda's mother—both vocationally and relationally." As the novel progresses, Miranda gives second chances to Julia, a girl whom Miranda initially hates, and Alice, a girl who always needs to use the bathroom but never does. Miranda previously considered Julia "a competitor for Annemarie's affection, and Alice as the weird kid who waited too long to go to the bathroom". By the end of the book, she finds Julia to be Annemarie's friend and discovers that Alice is an insecure girl.

Stead finds that kids today are much less independent since her childhood. She wrote, "[F]rom age nine, my friends and I were on the streets, walking home, going to each other's houses, going to the store. I really wanted to write about that: the independence that's a little bit scary but also a really positive thing in a lot of ways. And I'm not sure that most kids have that today". Throughout the novel, Miranda and her friends often walk around town without any adults. They are even found working in a sandwich store at lunch and walking home from school while trying to avoid the laughing man. While writing the novel, Stead hoped to show her sons the time period in which she lived, "send[ing] them on a little time-travel journey of their own". Laura Miller of The New Yorker found that this lack of independence in today's youth is mainly due to the fact that kids now grow up with adults constantly watching them. Miller noted how, despite the lower crime rate in current times, the "characters, middle-class middle school students, routinely walk around the Upper West Side by themselves, a rare freedom in today's city."

Time travel

Julianna Helt from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found that time travel forms a central theme as Miranda constantly wonders how time travel could be possible. In When You Reach Me, Marcus helps Miranda realize that the three old ladies from A Wrinkle in Time lied to Meg by promising they would return five minutes before they left. Marcus explains:

So the garden is where they appear when they get home at the end of the book. Remember? They land in the broccoli. So if they had gotten home five minutes before they left, like those ladies promised they would, then they would have seen themselves get back. Before they did.

Roger Sutton from Horn Book Magazine felt that the moment Marcus explains this flaw to Miranda is the first exchange that shows the novel to be complicated and mysterious. Quattlebaum noted, "The story's structure – an expert interweaving of past, present and future – brilliantly contradicts Miranda's commonsensical belief that the end can't happen before the middle." Stead explained her view of time travel in her novel, where going back in time is fulfilling the future, rather than changing it. She hoped to make the time travel element logical to show that "Miranda wasn't struggling to understand the seeming randomness and infinity of the universe, but learning that her world has value and that people do care about her".

Audiobook adaption

The audiobook adaption of When You Reach Me was released by Listening Library and contains four disks. In praise of Cynthia Holloway's performance of Miranda, M.V.P from Horn Book Magazine stated that her tone "emphasized the novel's interpersonal aspects". The reviewer found it beneficial that the chapter titles were added to the audio, since they seemed to add more detail about the book, but can be easily skipped over when reading. M.V.P criticized the voicing of Miranda's mom. AudioFile praised Halloway for "a strong reading ... [that] makes listeners curious about this story's nonlinear structure" and for managing the different elements of the story.

2010 Newbery Medal

Stead won the annual Newbery Medal recognizing When You Reach Me as the year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". The judges chose the novel for making the small details important to the plot. Chairwoman of the Newbery committee Katie O'Dell felt that "Every scene, every nuance, every word is vital both to character development and the progression of the mystery that really is going to engage readers and satisfy them". The committee was "very excited about this book because it is exceptionally conceived, finely crafted and highly original".

On January 18, 2010, a worker at Random House had tweeted the result 17 minutes prior to the official announcement. The tweet was quickly taken down when the mistake was noticed.

2012 survey

In 2012, When You Reach Me was ranked number 11 among all-time best children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a monthly with primarily U.S. audience. It was the only 21st-century work among the top 20.

Awards and nominations