It’s April 1979, and twelve-year-old Miranda is helping her mom get ready to be a contestant on The $20,000 Pyramid. But the arrival of the postcard saying her mom gets to be on the show reminds Miranda of something else—an anonymous note she’d gotten during the winter, a note that included the date of the show’s taping and the name of the TV studio. The date, we learn right away, was given in the note as “proof.” But proof of what, exactly? And why? So, having started with a puzzle, the story loops back to tell the story of the note, and what happened before and after it—a whole string of events from the fall through the winter leading up to the spring of Miranda’s sixth-grade year.
Miranda is a likeable narrator, funny and easy to relate to, and not just because her favorite book is A Wrinkle in Time, which was one of my childhood favorites. Her narration is full of little flashes of humor, like:
I was named after a criminal. Mom says that’s a dramatic way of looking at things, but sometimes the truth is dramatic. (7)
Or:
“Nice tights,” I snorted. Or I tried to snort, anyway. I’m not exactly sure how, though people in books are always doing it. (9)
Miranda and her mom live on the Upper West Side, and I liked the little bits of city/neighborhood life we get to see—the corner store on Amsterdam where Miranda sometimes helps out, the stationery store where Miranda’s new friend Annemarie has a family charge account, the story of how when Miranda was little, she and her friend Sal used to ride the bus together and see who could put his/her hand highest up on the pole. But the focus of the story is more interior than exterior, or at least, the story is more about Miranda’s immediate circle and their experiences than about a bigger city experience. Sixth grade turns out to be a confusing year for Miranda. First, her best/only friend Sal gets punched by some random kid. Then Sal stops hanging out with her. And then those mysterious notes start arriving. And while she’s trying to figure out what the notes mean—they talk about saving her friend, and needing her help to do so—she’s also trying to figure out how to negotiate her daily life now that she’s not spending all her lunches and afternoons with Sal. By the end of the book, Miranda’s figured out a lot—not just about who wrote the notes and why, but also about learning to navigate friendships, and about learning to reach out to people.
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