Customer Reviews

The Literacy Bridge - Large Print - The Blue Mirror

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.

I really liked this book. I thought it was really good. I liked how it showed that not all guys are nice and that if a guy is cute you shouldn't immedietly fall for him. This book has a good moral, it shows that girls should stay strong at all times and not get pushed around just because they are teenage girls.

16-year-old Maggy takes care of her drunken mother, draws at her favorite café and is generally invisible. Until she meets the skwatter (her spelling) Cole and his harem, then she feels alive. When she sees what he's done to the other two girls, she gets herself and attempts to get the others away as well. At first, I thought Cole was a vampire, but no he's a conventional user. "...I look at him once and I can't look away. Like the most perfect picture you ever saw, a walking wish come true: crow- black hair and loose green jacket, tall, even taller than me but when he moves it's not jerky or gawky, just pure grace, like he really belongs in his body, like it's his favorite place to be."
_The Blue Mirror_ is well worth reading.

Maggy's mother, Monica, was a physical therapist, an aide to the elderly, until she herself got hurt. Now, she stays at home, living off of disability checks, the child support Maggy's dad started sending after he left them, cigarettes, and alcohol. Maggy is eager to turn eighteen and get out of there, but she has another year and three months to go before hitting that faithful mark. She doesn't have any friends and she's not much of a student, but she dotes on her black cat, Paz, and she's an incredible artist. She spends her free time at a coffeeshop called Blue Mirror, where a kind twentysomething named Casey looks out for her, and where she can draw passersby without them seeing her.

Until, one day, someone does. His name is Cole, and he lives on the streets, as do Jouly and Marianne, the first as naive and childlike as the second is hard to read and bitter. Maggy begins spending more and more time with Cole, time that begins to pass by in a blur. Kathe Koja's writing style, which is sparse yet detailed all at once, is perfect for this kind of story. The Blue Mirror reads as it should, really getting into the mind of Maggy, making her neither a victim nor a hero, not a lovestruck girl nor a mature woman. She's somewhere in the middle, and once she figures out things for herself, she comes into her own. I enjoyed The Blue Mirror more than Straydog, which was well-written and powerful but upsetting, and Talk, which meant something but felt unfinished.

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

...And "Gaiman-esque" is one of the highest praises I can offer up, though when I say "almost" I mean it - it's good, but it's not at Neil Gaiman's level of craft yet.

I've read most of Kathe Koja's books, and when she's good, she's good (Cipher, Straydog) and when she's bad, she's very, very bad (Skin, Strange Angels).

This is Koja at her best again. There are actually a whole lot of things to dislike about this slim book, a lot of melodrama, rather pallid plot devices, and some moments of embarrassingly adolescent writing. But you know what? For some reason, none of that bothered me.

"Blue Mirror" is about an artistic girl named Maggy who spends her free time sketching things at a downtown cafe. She is something of a loner and outsider, and sees the world in a way others do not and translates that vision to her art. She skips school frequently and has to take care of an alcoholic, emotionally adolescent-like mother in a slummy apartment. She escapes into her world of art to get away from her boring and pallid life.

Her life takes a turn when she meets a strange and beautiful (the Japanese word "bishounen" comes to mind here) street kid named Cole who has near magical charm powers over girls. He has an entourage of followers, hangers-on, friends, named Jouly (nearly a child) and the punky, bitter Marianne. As she slowly assimilates herself into the trio, she finds out that Cole, and indeed a great many other things, are not what they seem.

The setup of this urban fable is very much like some of Gaiman's Sandman stories, and the descriptions of Cole's otherworldy charm, city squalor, and street kids reminds me very strongly of Caitlin R. Kiernan's style. To me, this whole book has a fable-like, fantastic, dreamy sense to it, like it's portraying the real world but turned some degrees askew. We can all guess at how this story is going to turn out long before it reaches its conclusion, but this book is one that for me isn't about the ending, it's about the journey - how we got to the end. It gets high points on mood, ambiance, and pictoral visualization... you poke holes in this book all day long, the point I'm getting across that the flaws were not enough of a detraction for me, and this book succeeded on its own merits enough for me to award it a 4 star ranking.

This book strives to land in the company of The Catcher in the Rye, Speak, and Wintergirls; it is a story of teenage angst and a young girl's attempt to deal with the world around her. However, I felt The Blue Mirror fell short of the books I have compared it to.

Koja uses heavily poetic language, which I did not enjoy. I think it cluttered the plot (what little there was... this isn't meant to be a plot driven story) and kept me at arms length from the main character, Maggy. In a story not driven by plot, but rather by character development and recognition, I wanted to identify with Maggy, to feel her struggle in society, to ache with her during her first heartbreak... I just couldn't. I've never been a poetry fan (it's a sad thing, really), so this wasn't the book for me. However, if you enjoy poetic language and YA literature, this is a decent read.

Koja also writes in an almost stream-of-conciousness fashion. She mixes thoughts with dialogue with action, never delineating between each. Again, not necessarily a bad thing for some readers (and I do, in fact, love Faulkner), I just found it rather disrupting in this book. I think my English degrees and years of teaching first-year writers proper punctuation and paragraph formation show here.

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!