My first two offspring never quite got into reading for pleasure, something which baffled me. When I was your age I carefully propped library books inside my school desk and tried to read them one line at a time by surreptitiously lifting up the lid-top of the desk while the teacher was talking! You don't even have to go to school and if you ever came to me and said, "Mom, can I just finish this book instead of doing my math?" I'd completely fall for it! I reminisce all the time about how I was allowed to buy a paperback book nearly every week when I was a kid! Do you know what I would have given to get my hands on an e-book reader back in 1984?
Truly you can't make your children love what you love. They are their own persons. My oldest turned into the sort of person who loves to read nonfiction, something I can relate to, and is perfectly happy to read novels for college literature classes and get A's on the papers. Number two prefers audiobooks, a preference that is harder for me to wrap my mind around, but I can see that he and I have different modes of taking in information.
More like me are the next two. The resident nine-year-old is by far the most voracious reader of my children so far, devouring series faster than we can keep up with him, and cheerfully re-reading his favorites over and over. He's the one whose reading style I identify with the most. The newly-minted 13yo also loves to read, maybe not quite so thirstily as her younger brother, and has a different taste in genres; she's always got a book going, though, and she seems to enjoy the literature H. assigns them to read for schoolwork (not always the same stuff I would read for pleasure, either).
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When I started homeschooling, I had this idea that I would fill my house up with enticing books and the children would spend their spare time curled up on chairs reading them. I would pretend to be annoyed that I had to drag them away from their paperback books to do their math, but I would let a little twinkle in my eye show that I was really pleased that they were engrossed in their reading. Well, I have filled up my house with books and stocked e-readers with titles and allowed my kids complete freedom of the bookshelves but none of that has come to pass (ingrates! do they know how much I would have loved to have freedom to read any hour of the day when I was their age? the only thing that made all my brother's Little League practices tolerable was that I could bring a book and read for three hours while I slowly sunburned!).
Nevertheless, she persisted.
Most of the books I put in were books I remembered from my childhood, sometimes the ones I remembered loving, other times the ones I remembered other people loving. This year after I reorganized my shelves, rotating the stock from the upstairs bookshelves to the schoolroom bookshelves with an eye to the ages of the children, I had a little space left over in my "novels for kids" zone, and decided to search out some more recent titles.
I'm not sure how I settled on When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Perhaps I saw a review somewhere; or perhaps a list of award-winning books, as it is the 2010 Newbery Medal recipient. Just after having finished the latest Neal Stephenson tome, which was pretty good and took me several days, I bought Stead's slim paperback from Amazon and read it in a couple of nights.
It had been a long time since I read a children's (not "YA") book that was new to me. And I fell into it like into the beanbag chair in my bedroom at home, the one next to the blue-painted bookshelf crammed full of my favorite, dog-eared paperbacks. The feeling of reading this book was just the same as reading the best of the children's books that I loved as a preteen, loved a little bit into my teenage years past the time when my peer group had shifted to the books aimed at teenagers, until I started reading books aimed at grownups.
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Here are the reasons why this is one of the great children's books.
(1) It is called a science fiction book by some of the reviewers, but it is mainly experienced as a mystery. The main character finds herself in the middle of some very strange happenings in her neighborhood, little events that seem to be of great import, and also events that seem small but turn out to be very meaningful. There are clues along the way, some of them obvious and some not so obvious, and the reader has the power of piecing them together if she is very, very attentive. And if she is not perfectly attentive -- well, I for one, on finishing the book, immediately turned back to the first page and read it again, in order to find as many of them as possible.
In this way, it reminded me of another Newbery Medal book, the 1979 winner, The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. Yep, another one that I keep fruitlessly trying to get my kids to read.
(2) The book takes place in New York City during the 1978-1979 school year, and features children going about their days from school to home in the city with very little supervision, encountering alarming people who really aren't a threat and less-alarming people who do turn out to be a threat. They have a great deal of freedom; they are cared for by adults who watch out for them, at home and at school, but those adults have their own concerns and do not micromanage the children's lives. Rebecca Stead has said that she wrote the book in part to show her own children what it was like to have one's "first independence" in that earlier time. This sense of being a child, vulnerable and at the same time expected to make one's own way around, is palpable in the book.
(3) This is in part a school story: there are a group of sixth-graders, interacting and whispering and wondering about each other. Are my friends still my friends? Does she like me or not? Why is he acting so mean? What's going on at home? It is among the best example of the genre called "surviving middle school:" in which the only source of drama is the normal-sized drama of children living their children's lives in the social fishbowl of their peers, when even the smallest slights seem terribly fraught with meaning. The best of those books, of which there were many, took the children's feelings as serious as we children did. This is one. There are hints of serious, even dark, things going on in the other children's lives; there are hints of incipient romance; but it's all under the surface and not fully understood, part of the mystery of life. I'll say it again: it feels like the good children's books of my youth.
(4) Every character, from the ones who make only brief appearances to the ones who are central to the story, is finely drawn and fully human. I especially loved the adults in the story, who are seen only from the young narrator Miranda's point of view, but whose actions tell the story of their interior lives. Miranda's mother is especially beautifully drawn, and quietly commands two whole story arcs of her own, one of which is under the surface, barely noticeable. There are also two school officials, barely mentioned, but who step in to do what they can to rescue a young person in trouble. Some of the other children Miranda encounters. You are left with a sense of the full humanity of the apparently-minor characters, in this story and in real life.
(5) There is a LOT going on in this book. There are numerous storylines going all at once; each of the supporting characters, even the least important of them, could have been the main character of a whole novel of their own. Indeed, in one sense Miranda is not the main character of this story at all; the story turns on her, but it can be argued that it is not actually about her. And this reinforces the finely-drawn characters: there is a secondary theme in the book, one that goes unstated: every person has their own story in which they are the main character. Everyone. And we are all supporting characters in other people's stories.
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Madeleine L'Engle's classic novel A Wrinkle in Time (Newbery Medal, 1963!) is itself almost a character in this book, a deliberate homage. Two characters bond over their common love for it. But it's also a reference meant to make a connection between the styles and subject matter. I expect Rebecca Stead hopes that her readers who enjoyed When You Reach Me will seek it out, and perhaps discover all of L'Engle's work, and maybe more of the great children's books of my youth. Now that I think about it, maybe I myself was drawn to When You Reach Me because somewhere I learned of the deliberate invoking of L'Engle within its pages. Whether the connections went forward in time, or back, I'm very glad they did.
I recommend this book for ages nine and up, and particularly for any child who has loved, or will love, A Wrinkle in Time.
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