Book Review: When You Reach Me

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a perfect book.  I don't know that I can say much more about it than that.  Well written, beautifully crafted, engaging, thoughtful, tessering.  Perfect.



"Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean.  It's like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten.  And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to."


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Book Review: First Light

First Light by Rebecca Stead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For better or worse, this book reminded me of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. And not in any way except that Stead created a secondary world that was entirely science fiction and entirely believable. A world that was more advanced than ours in ways but held onto a primitive ideal at the same time. A cold world. With humans and wild creatures as intimate companions.

But there's where the similarities ended. Stead has no agenda. She's simply telling a story. A very, very good story. She's a fine writer and I look forward to more from her pen.

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On second reading, 9 years later, HOW DID I MISS THE AGENDA?!?!?!? Global warming. The world Stead describes is going to disappear. And the denizens of the world are fighting a pitched battle between chosen ignorance preached by a leader who wants to hold on to power or plain fact that will embroil the world in changes that will end it in another way.

Entirely believable. Again.


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