The Blue Mirror

Maggie flees to The Blue Mirror, a café that serves as her sacred space, nightly to escape her drunk, depressed mother. There she nurses a drink and spends most of her time drawing the things and people around her, translating them into her own world, which shares a name with her café hide out. It's there that she meets Cole, a dreamy stranger who makes something inside her sing. Leader of a small band of street kids he's exciting, dangerous and manipulative. And he swears he loves her. After the questionable, uncomfortable love story of the Twilight books it's refreshing to have a fictional voyage into twisted love, framed by adult issues that teens are being forced to face more and more, and dreamy, hyper-flowing prose. This is one powerful book, despite it's short length and should be a must read in the modern overload of relationship dramas in young adult fiction.

This is the first Kathe Koja book I have had the pleasure of coming across, and I can tell any other newcomer here that it won't be my last. I am taking a course in writing literature for children and young adults, and this book is exemplary for kids to read. It teaches so much about the dangers of low self-esteem, but also has a happy resolve for two of the characters, Maggy and Marianne. It also reminds me of my younger days when I was so much like Maggy and thinking that flirting with danger was "cool." What Koja's book teaches young people is that you can never be careful or confident enough not to get hurt but, if you're smart, you will learn from your mistakes and there is no seemingly overpowering person who can take you away from yourself unless you allow them to. A really good, fascinating story that draws you in and doesn't let you go until the very end. If Cole's lines weren't so hokey and old, you might fall for him through Maggy's eyes too!

The Blue Mirror is a story I find captivating because it isn't a gushy love story where everyone is peachy and they live happily ever after. Yet it isn't shallow, not at all a book that would make you want to scream at the main character. In fact, Maggy is created like a true teenager, with the same thoughts and feelings. The 'poetic' language makes the book have a strange feeling I've never seen in a book before. It's wonderful, but sometimes the sentences go on forever and are hard to understand. The book is fairly short, but it stops at the right moment. I would rate this book Mature for language and sexual content, but it's realistic.

This is the wonderful story of Maggy, an with a alchoholic mother and a talent, a talent for art. She spends most of her time at the Blue Mirror a local café where she draws the world around her. But then she meets Cole a runaway and his friends Jouly and Marianne. She is intrigued by them and soon spends all of her time with the beautiful Cole. But soon things change and she finds things out about Cole things that are worrisome and change her initial outlook on Cole. But in the process she earns an unsuspecting friend. This story is wonderfully dark. The characters are magnificently drawn (especially Cole). If you love stories that show not only the darker side of human nature and are just overall dark (but good) you will love this story. *this book took me two hours to read it is realy easy and poetically written

Kathe Koja, The Blue Mirror (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2004) It should be obvious by now that any time a new Kathe Koja book comes out, I'll be reviewing it within a few weeks. The Blue Mirror is Koja's eighth novel, and her third for young adults. The YA novels are markedly different from her adult work; they are much shorter and more focused on a sole protagonist than her adult work (and, needless to say, there's less sex). The protagonist here is Maggy, a sixteen-year-old girl with an alcoholic mother, a cat she dotes on, a blatant indifference toward school, and a lot of artistic talent. She spends her afternoons in a window booth at the Blue Mirror cafe, drawing street scenes and drinking coffee. Until, that is, she meets a band of homeless kids led by mysterious, handsome Cole. Cole is the boy your mother always warned you about, and needless to say, things change quickly for Maggy. This is, perhaps, the YA novel that comes closest to one of Koja's adult novels; you can see the rawness through the paint scrapes (Maggy's mother being present and alcoholic, for example, rather than the referred-to-but-rarely-seen shades of parents in her earlier YA novels). Cole is very much the incubus, even if he doesn't sprout wings. As usual, Koja draws her characters with stunning believability, and nothing they do, no matter how irrational, ever seems out of character. The book's only real problem is that it's missing that certain undefinable something that makes Koja's best novels (Skin, Strange Angels, Straydog) into absolutely perfect works of fiction. But even without that whatever-it-is, he Blue Mirror is another ultimately worthy addition to the shelf of Koja novels you should all have been building next to the bed. Better than Buddha Boy, on a par with The Cipher. A must-read. **** 1/2