The Blue Mirror - Hardcover

Koja, Kathe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374308497 ISBN 13: 9780374308490

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004

Synopsis

Some guys are bad news

Sixteen-year-old Maggy's life consists of trying to be invisible at school, taking care of her alcoholic mother, and spending all the time she can at the Blue Mirror, a downtown café. She can lose herself there for hours with a cappuccino and her sketchbook, in which she creates a paper world she calls "The Blue Mirror." But everything changes when she meets Cole, a charismatic runaway. Maggy is intrigued by Cole's risky life on the streets and by the girls who follow him, childlike Jouly and strange Marianne. And when Cole says that he loves her, Maggy comes alive. As Maggy becomes more entwined with Cole and she looks at him with all her heart, she sees something far more dangerous than she may be capable of handling.

In poetic and evocative language, Kathe Koja draws us into the haunting, passionate world of The Blue Mirror.

About this title

Review:

The demon lover is an ancient theme with eternal appeal for young women, and Kathe Koja uses it to powerful effect in The Blue Mirror. Layered over the background of a contemporary and gritty street scene is the achingly poignant voice of sixteen-year-old Maggy, a loner and artist in love with a beautiful and mysterious boy named Cole. Maggy's greatest happiness is to sit for hours in the window booth of The Blue Mirror, nursing a cappuccino grande and capturing the life passing by in her sketchbook. At home she is an unwilling caretaker for her drunken mother, and her only comfort is her cat Paz--that is until Cole looks at her with those "incredibly deep and dark" eyes. The sweetness of his words and his vast need draw her in, and soon she spends almost all her days (and nights) wandering the cold streets with him, sleeping in his arms in a frigid open-air gazebo, and ignoring the other two women who trail him (childlike Jouly and angry Marianne). Not until Cole meets Paz (who greets him with terrified screeches and yowls), not until Marianne shows bruises and scrapes (from a "fall"), not until Jouly becomes a staring empty shell, and not until Maggy finally draws a true portrait of Cole, is she able to recognize the howling emptiness behind his pose of love. Koja's The Blue Mirror is an exquisite novel with just the slightest tinge of the supernatural. (Ages 14 and up) --Patty Campbell

About the Author:

Kathe Koja is the author of Buddha Boy and straydog. She lives in the Detroit area.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0374308497
• ISBN 13: 9780374308490
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128