When You Reach Me

Really adorable, charming YA book. I stumbled on it via an Interstellar hangover helper, of all things, because it features mind-bending time travel and messages sent back in time and tesseracts and stuff. And wow, what a lovely little book.

Taking place in a gritty, humanistic New York City of 1979, the story follows 12-year-old Miranda as she navigates her usual 12-year-old things. The book is pretty genius at capturing adolescence; the sci-fi elements are very, very light-touch, almost magic(al) realist, while being central to the story. The main narrative centers around Miranda starting to receive mysterious notes from “you” - and the notes can tell the future.

Very sweet, fun. Yeah, you can probably call the mystery fairly early in the book. But the whole thing is just so damn graceful: with lots of good, subtly-done life lessons, about compassion, forgiveness, imperfection and embracing the quotidian. Very spare, and yet full of gems. Wish it had existed when I was 12!