When You Reach Me

By Rebecca Stead, 199 pages.

When a reader starts this book they may think it is simply another story of a young girl and the aspects of her life, and it is. At first. At first, Miranda is a normal girl living in New York City in the seventies. She deals with typical things, like trying to figure out why her best friend Sal stopped talking to her; and some not so typical things, like her mom going on $10,000 Pyramid. But then things change. Miranda starts receiving strange notes, not in the mail but hidden in odd places. Stranger still, whoever wrote the notes seems to know things that haven't happened yet. Add to that the fact that the book is written as a letter to the unknown person, and we have a quite a mystery on our hands. Entertaining, mysterious, and just creepy enough, this is a great recommendation for kids who like to dabble in mystery stories.