When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

What is a book club but a gathering of more than one person discussing the same book? I don't want to join any book clubs, but that doesn't mean I don't love talking about books. Luckily, my friend EJ, who shares my passion for YA and middle grade fiction, feels the same way. So last year, we officially started our own club called "The Two Person Book Club." The use of the phrase "book club" cracks us up every time we say it. It's our tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that when you recommend a book to your friend and then you talk about it, it's really not a club. Or it really is a club. Whatever.

The thing that amuses me to no end about our "club" is that we've only officially only traded books and met to discuss them once before. However, we're constantly on the phone with each other, rambling on about this and that book, sharing recommendations, and picking them apart as we read them. Just last week, EJ called after finishing two chapters of Impossible by Nancy Werlin. "What did you think?" she asked me warily. I replied, just as warily, that it wasn't really my thing. And when we figured out that we both hated it (she, the two chapters that she had read), I was more than happy to launch into my diatribe about how overrated it was. "I'll keep going," she said, "and call you back when I'm done!" A few hours later, she called back and we happily trashed the novel to pieces.

EJ is visiting me in L.A. this week, so naturally as soon as she arrived I loaded her up with an armful of books to read. On the top of the pile was Rebecca Stead's middle-grade novel, When You Reach Me. "This is the BEST BOOK EVER," I told her.

When You Reach Me is about Miranda, a sixth grader whose simple and predictable life in 1979 New York City begins to unravel the day her best friend Sal gets punched on their walk home from school. Sal begins to ignore her, the apartment key that they keep hidden for emergencies is stolen, the crazy man on the corner seems more menacing, and then the mysterious notes begin to arrive. "I am coming to save your friend's life, and my own," the first note reads. Subsequent notes reveal that the writer knows details that no one could possibly know... at least at that moment.

At this point I have to admit that from a objective point view, When You Reach Me is, yes, an excellent book (sweet and intriguing, funny and sad, every character and plot point filled with layers and layers of nuance, so well-written that every sentence is a butterfly). However, most readers would probably look at me skeptically when I assert that it's the BEST BOOK EVER.

And I will tell you a secret that makes all the difference. I must warn you, it's a bit of a spoiler, but I think it will benefit you to know. I did not tell EJ this before she started, so I think she read the book with a certain frame of mind, and we agreed afterward that her enjoyment of the book might actually have been greater had she known. So skip the rest of this post if you must, but I think it's better to know: the book is about time travel.

Now, you know how I feel about time travel. Obsessive, perhaps? It's not necessarily the science of time travel, or the visiting of past/future that I like. It's the exploration of the consequences of time travel, and the Time Travel Paradox, which addresses the possible consequence of doing something in the past to prevent yourself from going back in time in the first place (for example, going back in time to kill your grandfather). It's an unsolvable conundrum! My brain LOVES this feeling of unsolvable paradox. It's like a jacuzzi for my neurons. Mmm.

Not that When You Reach Me involves an actual paradox, but all good time travel stories inherently need to resolve the paradox with their own internal logic. I love the figuring out of the looping chronology of time travel stories.

When you combine the wonderful characters, the lovely and playful language, and the quiet intrigue that runs throughout When You Reach Me with the extra added bonus of time travel, the result is a hybrid genre that exists squarely in both realistic fiction and science fiction, and tingles the brain in a most delightful way. EJ may not have thought it was the BEST BOOK EVER, but we still had endless lists of details we absolutely loved, enough to keep us chatting and rereading for the duration of her visit.

In fact, we decided that this is a bona fide meeting of the Two Person Book Club, called to order, in which we read, discuss, then blog about a single title. So, this is my post. Here is EJ's.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead