Every month where I am making good progress on my reading list, I pluck one interesting looking book at semi-random from my wife's collection; back in December (I am a bit behind on writing things up), that led me to this book, which I mostly went for because reviews on LibraryThing indicated it was in some way connected to A Wrinkle in Time.
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead |
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Published: 2009 Read: December 2024 |
It's a slim book, just under two hundred pages, and I blew right through it, both because it's a very easy read and because I very much enjoyed it. The book is about a young girl in 1970s New York living with her single mother, and I found it keenly observed and also funny. I was so into it that I found myself very tense with the last chapter, and emotional at the way it resolved.
Reviews on LT will give you a good sense of what makes the book so good, so here I just want to highlight a couple things that stuck out to me. That said, if you think you might read this book, I recommend skipping my next paragraph, because I will give something away that I think might work better as a creeping revelation... though I knew it going in and found my enjoyment was fine.
The first is, as probably many people have pointed out, the book is a response to A Wrinkle in Time. I always tell my students you need to look for those moments of metafiction in a book, those moments where a work draws attention to its own fictionality because in those moments the work is often (somewhat paradoxically) trying to stake a claim to being realistic. When You Reach Me does this by having a character draw attention to a lapse of time-travel logic in Wrinkle—a lapse you thus might not be surprised to realize that When You Reach Me does not commit itself. But it's not just time travel logic where When You Reach Me reads like a more realistic version of Wrinkle in Time, it's also in its depiction of young Miranda's social circumstances. Meg in Wrinkle is being raised by a single mother... but that's because her father is an astronaut on a space mission, and the kids all live in a big house with lots of accoutrements and opportunities. Miranda is the product of a one-off relationship and lives in a small apartment and is a victim of snobbery by classmates with more money. The critique clearly comes out of affection, but it is a critique of the original nonetheless.
The other thing that stuck out to me is an aspect of Miranda's psychology. Last summer, I learned about "attachment styles," a psychological concept that there are four different ways we relate to others. A couple online quizzes have informed me that I am "anxious": "People with an anxious attachment style can be consumed with concern that their loved ones will abandon them, and they may seek constant reassurance that they’re safe in their relationship." I am often preoccupied with the feeling that my loved ones probably don't love me back, that my friends might like me all right, but they probably don't really like me. In Miranda, I found one of the most thoughtful but also subtle depictions of anxious attachment; though secure in her relationship with her mother, Miranda constantly feels like her friends don't actually like her and worries that they will abandon her... even thought they never actually do! I don't know if this was intentional on Stead's part, but I found it a very powerful thread within the novel, even if it was only a small part of the tapestry.
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