When You Reach Me

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead is a mystery for 11 year olds, written as a letter to somebody whose name you are never told.

What happens

Miranda is twelve and lives in New York with her mum. It is 1979. She is a latchkey child, which she will explain comes with certain rights, including afternoon television and an entire bag of Cheez Doodles before dinner.

Mum has finally got a place on The $20,000 Pyramid. Twenty one days to practise. Miranda writes the words out on index cards her mum has swiped from the office, because the more she swipes the more she is hating work.

Then things start going wrong. Sal, who lives downstairs and has been her best friend since they were babies in the lobby, stops speaking to her. Notes begin turning up in tiny jerky handwriting, from somebody who already knows what is going to happen. One of them gives the exact date her mum will be on that show, months before the postcard arrives.

The first note asks Miranda to write a letter. That letter is this book.

It is a quiet book and a slightly strange one. She tells you ordinary things in enormous detail. Her mum's electric blue nails. Mr Nunzi burning another hole in the sofa at the tenants' meeting. Belle at the corner shop, who never judges a book by its cover, only by the first line.

Then every so often Miranda stops and speaks straight to whoever sent the notes, and you realise all of this is evidence.

She is also rereading one book over and over, so battered that Belle comments on the state of it. It is about a girl called Meg whose father has gone missing.

This one does ask something of your reader. It moves about in time, holds a lot back and only fully makes sense at the end. A child who likes to be pulled along by plot may find the middle slow going. A child who enjoys collecting details and running a theory will be in heaven.

One thing to flag. There is a man who lives on Miranda's corner, sleeping with his head under the postbox, kicking out at traffic and shouting at the sky. Some of the children call him names. Miranda is frightened of him and says so. It is written kindly, and her mum will not let anyone mock him, but he is there from very early on and he is not a comic character.

What to read next

Miranda's battered favourite is here too. A Wrinkle in Time opens on a dark and stormy night, with Meg Murry up in the attic, certain that she does everything wrong, and a father nobody will explain.