By: Rebecca Stead
Rate: very good
When You Reach Me is a Newbery Medal book, and I’m not surprised. Miranda is getting mysterious notes from…well…someone, saying the person who is writing the notes is going to save Miranda’s friend’s life and his own life too. Miranda feels like this person can predict the future or something. But at school, everything is normal. She meets a smart kid called Marcus and makes friends with Julia and Annemarie.
Anyway, there is a crazy man at the corner of a street Miranda always passes on her way back from school, called by her the ‘laughing man’. He would kick his foot into the middle of the road and say something crazy. But one day Miranda’s former best friend, Sal, is almost hit by a truck, but the laughing man saves him, by kicking into the road and sacrificing himself. That’s when Miranda realizes everything. The laughing man is sending the notes, he was practicing kicking all the time for saving Sal, and Marcus is the laughing man, and the laughing man is Marcus. It may sound confusing, but the laughing man just time traveled and came back to when he was a kid. But why? To look at Julia. Why? Julia was his wife. Huh? How do I know? Because Miranda looked under the mailbox where the laughing man always was, curious why he always looked under the mailbox. There she saw a delicate drawing of Julia when Julia was old. So, Julia must have been Marcus/the laughing man’s wife, and she died, and the laughing man must have been sad so he came back in time to see young Julia.
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