With video games and the Internet tempting kids, with city libraries closing on the weekends and with what may seem like endless school days spent either taking standardized tests or prepping for those tests, adults can’t be blamed for asking: Do kids nowadays actually read books anymore?

Fortunately, children book sales figures attest to the fact that they do.

In Houston, Inprint has been doing their part to make sure there will be a next generation of adult lovers of literature by creating a family reading series called Cool Brains. This Sunday they bring author Rebecca Stead to town for a reading and talk about her best-selling and Newbery Award winning novel, When You Reach Me.

Before her trip to Houston — her first visit to our city — Stead talked with CultureMap about her books and her love of writing for children.

A former New York City public defender, she tried her hand at writing adult short stories, but in a tragic four-year-old-son-meets-laptop mishap she lost many of those stories and decided to make a change to children’s books.

When I asked Stead what the difference is between writing for a young audience instead of an adult one, she replied that writing for kids is “really freeing.”

“They’re particularly active readers, in the sense that they’re whip smart and rooting for the story to work. . .They have high standards but are generally not looking for the flaws.”

She loves writing for middle graders because “they’re at this point of life where they’ve really started to blossom brain-wise, intellectually.” Stead has done reading on what neurology tells us about the developing brain and discusses how children during the 10-12 years are at a point when they’re growing neurologically but hormones have not yet overwhelmed them. Those years are also a time when children are still “wide-open” and not yet spending “so much energy towards self-protection,” when “there’s not that paralyzing fear that you’re not O.K.”

Stead believes those “wide-open” years are actually similar to one other point in our life. “I sometimes say I write for middle graders and also for adults who are in mid-life crisis. Because suddenly you’re questioning ‘What is my life about?’ and ‘How do I find happiness?’. . .when you’re thinking about all new starts and new pathways.”

Stead describes middle school and middle age as the two points in life where we “stop and ask all those basic questions.”

Reading When You Reach Me, I found it easy to understand why it was the Newbery committee’s choice. In the novel, 12-year-old Miranda begins to ask those “basic questions” of her own seemingly ordinary life in New York City in 1978. But like most heroes in literature, that ordinary life soon becomes extraordinary.

Miranda begins receiving a series of mysterious notes. The first one promises “I am coming to save your friend’s life and my own.” A later one asks her to write a letter that “must tell a story--a true story. You cannot begin now, as most of it has not yet taken place.”

Miranda and the reader soon begin to realize that the world and time aren’t as simple as we think they are, and a life can be saved by storytelling and a little bit of time travel.

Are 10-12 years olds ready for an intricately plotted book that involves the possibility of time travel? Stead knows they are.

“Kids are really able to wrap their brains around this story and adults sometimes less so. I think it’s that whole question about being open and playing with a lot of the basic questions about life and who we are. I think sometimes adult experience kind of narrows us.”

The kids she speaks to seem to be “completely flexible and comfortable about these puzzles and far out questions about what would time travel be.” She recently visited a sixth grade class where they debated different ideas about traveling back through time and the sixth graders got so excited they were shouting their own theories on the subject.

Since time is a little difficult to unravel, the novel is arranged around categories of the old game show, The $20,000 Pyramid. Miranda’s mother is about to become a contestant on the show and throughout the book Miranda helps her practice. “The game becomes this lens through which she’s trying to make order of her whole experience she’s had. . .She’s discovering all these people she put into categories don’t completely belong there,” Stead explains.

Stead talks with the kids she meets about our need to categorize. “What I always say to kids is that we all are putting one another into categories all the time. We can’t stop it. . .but we can at least be aware of it. That can maybe help us to think twice before categorizing someone.”

One of the most-lasting images in the book is of Miranda lovingly carrying around her copy of the classic children’s novel, A Wrinkle in Time, and her need to share that story with other characters in the book. I asked Stead if she thinks kids today also carry around a copy of their favorite book, or if that is, unfortunately, an image from the past.

Stead believes it’s not. She meets “tons of kids who are passionate about books.” When she visits schools, she likes to run her talks with the students “as a conversation.” They not only want to talk to her about her books but the books they are reading right then. She says “It’s very moving, really” when they wish to share their experience and feelings about the books they love.

“Obviously you read a lot about the end of books and how it hard to persuade kids to read because they’re always on twitter or playing video books or on facebook or texting each other, that they don’t have the time to read or the patience to read or the attention span. But I feel like I’m meeting these incredibly passionate readers all the time. . .I don’t worry that kids aren’t passionate about books anymore.”

 Passionate Houstonian book lovers of all ages can meet Rebecca Stead at Pershing Middle School Sunday at 3 p.m.