Meet Miranda, a mostly-average 12 year old girl living in late ‘70s New York. Her favorite book, bar none, is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle*. She carries a worn, much loved copy with her everywhere, compulsively re-reading it.

The big news in Miranda’s life is that her mom’s going to be a participant on the $20,000 Pyramid (with Dick Clark!). Otherwise, Miranda goes to school, falls in and out with her friends, and copes with preteen life. Miranda is the narrator of When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, and she has a great voice. You keep reading because you like listening to her tell this spare, erratic story.

And it is an odd little story indeed, written in an almost journal style, to a mysterious "you." Amid the relative normality of middle school life, Miranda receives anonymous, cryptic notes and a variety of things go missing. Meanwhile, there’s the laughing man, who lives under the mailbox on the corner and kicks at the traffic. Clearly, something a little off-beat is going on, and clues lay thick upon the ground.

When all the clues finally came together, I had a "light-bulb" moment — a flash where all the seemingly unrelated bits melded into one terrific whole. Strangely enough, it’s Miranda’s ever-present book (one of my own childhood favorites) that provides the solution.

*If you aren’t familiar with A Wrinkle in Time, you may miss many references in Stead’s book. L’Engle’s award-winning novel offers a beautiful look at family, friendship, and trust as it follows teenage Meg and her younger brother Charles Wallace when they go to rescue their physicist father from another dimension. Technically a science fiction story, it’s a literary gem full of intriguing characters, a driving plot, and an underlying message about how the smallest voices can sometimes wield the most power.

Editor’s Note: When You Reach Me has won the John Newbery Medal for 2010! More information here.

Kristen Blount – Administration Office