Megan Moruzzi

Megan Moruzzi
When You Reach Me
Rebeca Stead
Mystery
Just right
just finished (200)



1.I have just finished When You Reach Me, by Rebeca Stead and the ending was extremely surprising. In the book the main character, Miranda and her friend walk to school everyday, and everyday they see the same man under the mail box and the bad boys in there garage area. One day they are walking by the boys and one boy comes out and randomly kicks Miranda's best friend Sal. After the weird occurrence Sal stops talking to Miranda and stops walking to school with her. They go there separate ways and they make new friends. Miranda finds out that the boy that hit Sal is not a bad person and gets to know him a little more as a person. His name is Marcus and he is very interested in time travel. He is always trying to explain time travel to her but she doesn't understand it very well. The man that lies under the mail box is crazy and he practices kicking in the air. The end of the book happened fast for me was confusing at times. Sal is afraid of Marcus so at the end of the book Miranda and Marcus were walking and Marcus wanted to apologies for hurting him so he starts running after him. Sal is afraid of Marcus so he started running to. Sal was running so fast and he was so distracted by Marcus that he was headed right for the middle of the busy intersection and couldn't stop. Meanwhile a huge truck was coming down the street and Sal was running to fast to stop. With very quick thinking the man under the mail box stood up out from underneath his mailbox and ran to the middle of the street and kicks Sal so hard that he flew to the other side of the intersection. The guy got hit by the bus and died. He saved Sal's life. Marcus was on the sidewalk kneeling down crying. Sal was okay he just had a broken arm and a couple scrapes. Further into the book Miranda's mother was invited to be on a game show were you could win up to 20,000 dollars. Everyone was invited to go and see Miranda's mom be on the game show. Richard is Miranda's moms boyfriend and he was in the audience along with Miranda, Sal and Sal's mom. While all this crazy stuff is happening with the game show Miranda is thinking about these letters that she has been getting ever since Marcus hit Sal. She is thinking about how they relate to the man that lied under the mailbox's death. She is trying to lift a corner of her Vail so that she can see the big picture. She realizes all in the same moment that the guy under the mailbox was really Marcus in the future and he came back to save Sal's life.
2. This is definitely one of my favorite books. I really liked the way that this book was set up. I also liked the way that the author left the little hints to who might be the person leaving the notes even though my predictions were never correct. I also liked how the characters got along. I noticed that Sal and Colin(a friend of Miranda's) started getting along at the end of the book, and Miranda and Julia(one of Annmaria's friends) started getting along at the end of the book to. I thought that the plot of the book was very interesting because it always left you with questions in your head about what was going to happen next or what did something mean. The author is very well at pulling you into the story in several ways. For example at the end of every chapter was a cliffhanger that made me want to keep reading and solve the problem. Also she made each characters personalities very different which made it very interesting to see the argument that the characters would get into. I have never read any books by this author which was also really fun and I will definitely be reading another. overall I really enjoyed reading this and would highly recommend it to anyone who likes a good mystery.
3.A theme that I think shows up a lot in When you reach me is redemption. Redemption is the action of saving or getting saved. Some places where I think it showed up was when the crazy homeless guy runs into the street and saved Sal. He put his own life to death to save someone els. I feel this theme also shows up when Richard is introduced in the book. I feel like Miranda's mom saves him in a way because you can tell that he wasn't very happy before and now he is because he has his girlfriend that he loves and Miranda which he also adors.
4.My favorite character in this book was Annmarie. This is a friend that Miranda meets when she stops hanging out with Sal so much. She turns into a best friend that she does everything with. I really like Annmarie because she has so much to show off yet she is so modest. I like this about her because she makes me feel good that Miranda is Friends with her because I can really trust her as a character. She has a family that loves her and that is also important to me because I feel like sh is getting treated he way that she deserves to be.
5. My least favorite character is jimmy. Jimmy is Annmarie, Colin and Miranda's boss at the sandwich shop. I don't really like him as a character because he when Miranda cant get the cut of the sandwich correct he just lets he feel bad about it instead of helping her. He also blames the three of them for steeling his Fred Flinstone bank and just fires them without even saying anything about it to them or asking any question he just assumes that they did it. Also he doesn't pay them for there hard work or even let them take the good sandwiches he just lets them have a cheese sandwich everyday for lunch which is nice but i feel like they deserve more than that.
6.I had absolutely no idea that the ending was going to turn out the way that it did. I was not expecting the homeless man to die. I also didn't expect that the crazy homeless man was Marcus in the future who had come back to save Sal's life. I realize now that it was really important to read carefully when Marcus was trying to explain time travel to Miranda because the end of the book was confusing when she was figuring out that Marcus was the homeless man because in a way she was explaining how time travel worked to herself even though she was still confused herself. The author didn't really give you any clues while you were reading that the homeless man was the person leaving Miranda the notes but after Miranda figured it out I went back and was thinking about the different things that he was doing and realized that some if the things he was doing actually were clues but I just didn't know it at the time, like practicing his kicks in the street.