Things Full of Time Travel Awesome

When Publisher's Lunch landed in my inbox last week and informed me that the book I'd just finished, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, was awarded the 2010 Newbery Award, I did the Snoopy Dance. Why, you ask? Two words: time travel.

Already, you know it's full of win for me, but it goes on to incorporate homage to A Wrinkle in Time (quite possibly one of my favorite childhood reads), the $10,000 Pyramid (who doesn't love thinking of words for categories like Things That Are Cracked?) and all the angst associated with sixth grade. Toss in a mind-bending mystery of temporal proportions and it makes me want to kiss the acquiring editor at Random House. Only if he doesn't look like this:

Or this. . .

From the School Library Journal:

(recommended Grades 5-8)

Miranda lives in 1978 New York City with her mother, and her life compass is Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. When she receives a series of enigmatic notes that claim to want to save her life, she comes to believe that they are from someone who knows the future. Miranda spends considerable time observing a raving vagrant who her mother calls the laughing man and trying to find the connection between the notes and her everyday life.

I'm pretty sure that's my life's compass, too. To land in a broccoli patch ten minutes before I left it.

Complete with an awesome diamond-facet description of time theory and enough eccentric characters to put my family to shame, this story explores underlying issues of race and class and relationships we all must navigate in a completely warm and full-circle kind of way.

Score one for time travel fiction.

Miranda's mother prepares to be a contestant on the $10,000 Pyramid game show throughout the novel. In honor of that creative little hook Ms. Stead incorporated into her narrative (and brilliant chapter titles), we'll play a modified blog version of the winner's circle today.

I'll give the clues, you guess the category. Ready....go....

"A cheesy script, Tori Spelling..."