Sigh. This seems to be another time-travel book that no one calls science fiction. It is wearing to have all that barbed wire to climb over, getting in and out of the genre ghetto. Some days you just get so tired of the snags in your socks.
But the ghetto doesn’t apply to kids’ books, right? Subvert them when they’re young, mwa ha ha, although they seem to finally be calling A Wrinkle in Time a science fiction book. Perhaps it was just to justify the dayglo makeup on Oprah in the movie.
Speaking of a Wrinkle in Time, my next middle-grade adventure is a humdinger of an homage to that very novel. In When you Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, Miranda carries her favorite book with her everywhere, and that just happens to be Wrinkle. In fact, she refuses to read anything else. (Whoa there, Missy, there were sequels, too.) Another main character in the book figures out how to tesser in time, and that fact is central to the plot and the novel’s structure. But is that what the book is about? What a good question!
No. At its heart, it’s about friendship, at that age where friendship is everything, at least among girls. How you treat your friends, how you betray your friends, how you do or do not trust other people, whether your pride prevents you from helping a friend— that’s what it’s about. But the time-travel makes it all so much more amazing, in a 12 monkeys kind of way. (If you haven’t seen 12 monkeys, go see it now. I’ll wait.)
I am late to the party in heaping praise on When You Reach Me but it deserves another heap. Anything that can get me to spend a Saturday afternoon re-reading almost the entire book to notice the clues I missed before, and working out whether the ending would have completely changed the future or not, deserves its popularity, even if it didn’t have to spend time locked up in the scifi ghetto with the other deserving books. The deft handling of clues, and the revelation of bits and pieces of the mystery was masterful. I would dearly love to know how the author kept track of when she would reveal what. If you want to learn how to write a mystery, this book is a great model of the controlled release of information.
I love this book for so many reasons, but mostly because the author played fair with the reader and gave us all the information we needed to work out what was happening, before the narrator apparently did. If you paid attention, you even noticed when the main character’s self-centered behavior may have been partially responsible for the almost-tragedy, that was a tragedy nonetheless. See how I am trying not to create a spoiler here? Whew.
Despite this, the reader is rooting for the MC, but the complexity of motives and emotions is what’s so satisfying and plausible. I’m going to make a philosophical pronouncement and say that girls can be pretty mean at that age, especially in the throes of that “you’re not my best friend anymore” warfare.
For the record, I completely choked up at the unexpected dedication in a book Miranda receives as a gift. I admit it, okay?
This was a beautiful book that makes you both think and feel, and it’s quite clear why it won the Newbery Honor Medal.
Now please, Ms. Stead, share your plot chart with us?
For extra credit, a youtube video in which Dr. Tyson explains dimensions and tesseracts in a way which lets me (and everyone else) off the hook for having so much trouble trying to visualize this in high school geometry class. Tesseracts – Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thank you, Dr. Tyson, for helping me let go of geometry trauma.
For extra, extra credit (you nerds know who you are) if you like time travel books, I can recommend the Ijon Tichy books by Samuel Lem. Start with Memoirs of a Space Traveler and once you’ve had a taste you can move on to the rest. Not only is the science right, but the books are quite funny.