Galley Talk: ‘When You Reach Me’

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By Stephanie Anderson -- Publishers Weekly, 7/16/2009

Stephanie Anderson, manager of WORD in Brooklyn, N.Y., talks about a favorite summer galley.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (Random/Lamb, July) is a novel about Miranda, a middle-school girl from New York, whose favorite book is A Wrinkle in Time. She starts receiving notes, left outside her apartment, that creep her out. She has no idea who is writing them. In the meantime, the story is also about her relationship with her best friend. The two of them get pulled into this weird thing and they don’t know what is going on. I don’t want to give away the main plot mechanism and spoil it for people who haven’t read the book yet, but I will say that there is a very cool thing that goes on. This is also a really a very nice story about a friendship. And there is some beautiful writing about New York. In fact, the city and the block Miranda and her friend live on are very much characters themselves.

It would be foolish for most authors to feature A Wrinkle in Time in their own books—few are the equal of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic, so why invite the comparison? But When You Reach Me is one of those few books. It is easily one of the best middle-grade novels I have read in years, with fantastic characters and a plot that’s like running up a hill and then sledding down the other side. I was so astonished by it that I started reading it again right after I finished it, thinking that there was no way that it was as clever and fantastic as it seemed. But it was—and it is!

I would recommend this novel to any bookseller, even those not normally interested in reading children’s books. In fact I’d recommend this book to almost anybody. I very much look forward to handselling it. Of course you can never tell with these things, but I really feel like When You Reach Me will become a classic.