When You Reach Me, a YA novel by Rebecca Snead, is a pretty good mystery. Actually, I thought it was terrific until it turned all time-travel and new-age-ish. Then, while I guess that element made it a contender for last year's Newberry, I was annoyed because I was having too much fun figuring out whodunit. I never like it when my mental gymnastics are rendered useless. And it isn't like the mystical element hadn't been prepared for. References to
A Wrinkle in Time abound. Truthfully though, the book I thought I was reading wouldn't have been award quality. The book I actually read was.
Specifics:
1) There's a brief discussion of the phrase "latchkey child." A page later, the narrator, Miranda, has polished off a bag of Cheez Doodles and says, "After-school junk food is another fundamental right of the latchkey child." (page 5) Took me back. I was a latchkey child, and my memory is that the first activity after arriving home from school was eating.
2) Miranda has done a project which presents possible reasons for yawning. "My own theory, which I included on the poster, is that yawning is a semipolite way of telling someone that they're boring everyone else to death." (page 23) Semipolite? What is our youth becoming? (Not terribly literate, that's for sure. "They" agrees with "someone"? I don't think so. But be gone, Miss Picky. The narrator is in the fourth grade, and the book's tone is conversational.)
3) Of course any new-age YA book is going to have deep and meaningful moments.
Mom says that each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except that kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way.
But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there's a wind blowing it away from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. (page 71)
Actually, I kind of like that. A lot.
4) "Warm almonds sounds (sic) kind of yuck …" (page 111) This time Miss Picky will not be ignored. To the best of my knowledge "warm almonds" is not a collective noun, and I know of no exception to subject/verb agreement rules that says if the writer sees several items as a single identity, those items become a collective noun. Am I wrong? Is there something new?
5) Miss Picky again. Maybe. The book is set in 1979, and it's Christmas. "I had bought Mom … a bottle of purple nail polish with glitter in it …" (page 134) My memory is that glitter nail polish wasn't in vogue until the mid or late nineties. Anyone know for sure?
6) "I walked up a hill where the sunlight seemed to touch everything like it was a hyper kid running all over a toy store …" (page 139) Good simile, IMHO.
Bottom line: If anyone has children or grandchildren* who are fans of Madeline L'Engle,
When You Reach Me would make a terrific Christmas present.
*(or is/was a fan him/herself)
