Rebecca Stead, who are you? Where did you come from? You are the Middle-Grade Whisperer, the master of the quiet-yet-somehow-filled-with-tension chapter book, the Patron Saint of urban children.

I loved When You Reach me and I loved Liar & Spy. Georges is similar to When You Reach Me‘s Miranda – sensitive, observant, New Yorker mired in the social horrors that arise during that tender time that between childhood and the teen age. Georges has lost his close friend to a crowd of popular bullies and lost his house with a customized lofted bed made from a real fire escape. His parents move him into an apartment building in his Brooklyn neighborhood and he meets a family of mildly-eccentric homeschoolers, two of whom run various espionage operations around the building. There’s no supernatural mystery in this story, but Georges slowly realizes that nothing in his new life – his friends, his classmates, his family – is quite what it seems. Details unravel at a quickening pace, lies are revealed, and the pages will flip by before you know it.

I may have almost cried when this book ended. Maybe.

Liar & Spy is getting a bit of awards-season buzz, but I’m not sure it will be get as much attention as When You Reach Me – it’s not quite as complex, as intertextual, as fresh, as historical. But what Stead does here, again, is show off her seemingly growing talent in portraying the heartbreaks of childhood without resorting to tragic shock story lines; in capturing the everyday problems of her sympathetic characters, she does so much more. I wish you could bottle up a little bit of Stead and sprinkle it on every children’s book. This book may have turned me into a bonafide fangirl.

Every week, I make a little note in my planner to Write a Book Review. However, this implies that I should have, each week, read a book that I would like to review.

I am not reading as much or as often as I should, so here I am, Writing a Book Review… of a book I didn’t read.

Granted, it’s not really a review. My non-review will be brief and reflect only the material I have read, and despite my misgivings, I might continue to read it.

You see, it all started on the green line, a fresh new library book in my bag calling my name (see also: why I can’t finish reading a book). A few pages into James Wood’s How Fiction Works and I was smitten. Writing instruction merged with pop-literary criticism, emphasis on structure? Oh, baby, oh baby. And Wood writes in these intoxicating little idea bits, every few paragraphs numbered, clearly distinguishing between ideas. This is all the pleasure of studying literature without any of the parts that hurt your brain.

Still on the green line. Wood is discussing the many advantages of free direct discourse, summoning memories of creative writing classes past, and his example on page 12? Make Way For Ducklings. Children’s lit being acknowledged in a lit crit book for mainstream adult audiences. I am basically making out with this book at this point. Fellow train passengers are looking at me strangely.

Then, page 13 happens:

“What happens, though, when a more serious writer wants to open a very small gap between character and author?”

Really? Really!?

I hang out with so many kid lit champions that I sometimes forget how easily this genre that I love can be dismissed. Boo on you, Wood, for writing this, boo on any FSG editors who let this completely superfluous phrase that adds nothing to Wood’s larger argument to remain on the page.

And boo for me for submitting to the temptation of something shiny when I could have cracked open one of the other books in my bag. Perks of Being a Wallflower or Dying to Know You.

Kid stuff.

File this post under: How A Children’s Lit Degree Destroys Everything You Love. Ask me sometime about how I wrote 4 papers on The Giver in 9 months…