When You Reach Me

Miranda Sinclair is a sixth grader on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the school year 1978 to 1979, and the book opens with her narrating events that have already ended, addressed to someone she calls you, whom she is trying to convince of something urgent before it happens. Her best friend Sal stops speaking to her without explanation after being punched by a stranger on the street, and Miranda starts receiving small unsigned notes tucked into odd places, notes that seem to know things about her future before they happen and that eventually ask her to write down a specific story, in exchange for saving a friend's life. Miranda spends her days working at a sandwich shop with her friends Annemarie and Colin, watching her single mother rehearse for an appearance on the game show The $20,000 Pyramid, and rereading her favorite book, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which supplies the language Miranda eventually uses to understand what is happening to her. The mystery comes to a head when Marcus, a strange, calculating classmate Miranda has slowly come to trust, chases the newly reconciled Sal into the street, and a homeless man known locally as the laughing man shoves Sal clear of an oncoming truck and is killed himself. Miranda works out, in the book's final pages, that the laughing man was Marcus grown old, having found a way to travel back through time to save Sal exactly once, and that the notes she received all along were his, sent to make sure she would deliver the one message that let the whole loop close.

Stead builds the mystery from small, ordinary details, a stolen key, a missing dollar bill, a locked mailbox, that only reveal their purpose in hindsight, and the book rewards a second reading almost more than the first. It suits patient, puzzle loving readers willing to hold several loose threads in mind at once, and its late 1970s New York, full of kids moving through the city without adult supervision, will read as its own kind of foreign country to many contemporary readers.