08 July 2010

Time Travel


For Module 3
Stead, R. (2009). When you reach me. New York: Wendy Lamb Books.

Miranda is so sad when her erstwhile best friend gets punched in the stomach and stops hanging out with her. To make things worse, a strange man seems to be living underneath the mailbox and chants strange words to himself. Then pieces of a strange mystery start to appear and Miranda finds herself part of something temporally impossible. Or is it possible?

My view:
I wish time travel was really possible. A couple of years ago I stumbled on I Am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak. You remember him---he wrote The Book Thief and won many honors for it. Anyway, I Am the Messenger was entrancing and confusing and beautiful---and written for an older audience than Rebecca Stead's Newbery Award winning book When You Reach Me. But the premise is somewhat similar. I liked the twisting and turning, even braiding of the different aspects of the plot together---like the "streaker" who ran through the streets and prevented school from being out one day. It was reminiscent of The Time-Traveler's Wife, in a way. Mainly, I loved the tying together of the love and the sacrifice and the cryptic phrase the man (I don't want to spoil anything) muttered. I also liked the connections between A Wrinkle in Time and the narrator---it shows that books can have marvelous and lasting impact on life. I feel an essay about this subject starting to sprout inside of me.

Because this book won the Newbery Award, it has myriad reviews. One from School Library Journal says, "The climax is full of drama and suspense. This story about the intricacies of friendship will be a hit with students."
Crewdson, A. (2009) When you reach me (review). School Library Journal 55(12), 69.

For an older group of kids in a book group, I could see pairing this book with the movie Somewhere in Time, or in a writing group having the participants write about something they would like to go back in time to change. Hey, maybe that can be a topic for my next meeting of Write On!

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