Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan Arthur A. Levine Books When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead Wendy Lamb Books Judged by Julius Lester
Reading is subjective. What one experiences in a book, how much of a book one understands depends on what one brings to the act of reading. This is often illustrated in book reviews. One reviewer of a recent novel of mine wrote that the characters were stereotypes. Another reviewer of the same book wrote that the characters were brilliantly drawn. Book reviews often say much more about the reviewer than the book being reviewed.
This prelude is my way of saying that I am not the ideal reader of the 2010 Newbery winner, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. For me, reading is relational, an act in which I spend time with the characters in a novel and its author. Essential in creating this relationship is the voice(s) in which the story is told. The first person narrator of When You Reach Me, is Miranda, a sixth grader growing up in New York City. For whatever reasons Miranda’s voice did not engage me, and thus, neither did the story Miranda is telling. I did enjoy the descriptions of growing up on the upper West Side of Manhattan in 1979, and what it’s like to be a child growing up in such a milieu. I enjoyed that there was a black character whose race is mentioned in passing. I suspect that my inability to …
