Customer Reviews

Mirror, Mirror: Twisted Tales

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

 

 

The many stories of the book Mirror Mirror I found one very intresting! The secrets of lizard magic. In the story there is a very ill father that has two loving sons and a very smart daughter. The two sons go off into the dangerous desert and run into lots of issues they have to deal with. Both of them found a misterious egg that they thought would be good to cook up and feast but before they got to do anything both of them eventually got captured by bandits. The sister made her journey after the boys had failed. She was smart enough to hatch the egg to see what was inside which helped her it turned out to be a magical lizzard named ixpetz.The magical lizzard helped her save her brothers many times and also lead the way to what they needed. The story was very different and intresting it had me on the edge of my seat waiting to see what the daughter and ixpetz did next. The beging was a little slow but when they maid there journey to the devils backbone I was just waiting to see if they were going to find the cure for there ill father. Eventually the story came to a end and ixpetz had to leave them and she had to make it home with her two brothers and back to see her dying father I wont give away the ending but it is not a sad one.

This book is so good and very scary! I like the one about the girl spliting in half! It rocks! I hope that young adults will like it!

Silverman clearly had an astounding sense of fantasy when he wrote this book. Everything was just different from normal fairy tales. But even though each chapter went beyond the imagination, something about each of them clearly had a sense of the real world in it as well. I really suggest that if you're looking for something different, or stories going past the imagination, get this book, and read it.

Mirror Mirror is an interesting book. On the cover, it reads "twisted tales," but apparently the author doesn't know what a good kind of twisted is. What is found in this book are stories that come across as sickening, (not to be confused with sick, disgusting, intense, or gross) incomprehensible, or just plain stupid.
The stories in here fall into two categories. They're either unoriginal, or no fun. The stories are granted with little morals, not-so-subtley woven into the tale. The most valuable lessons are taken straight out of either the Chicken Soup For the _(age-group) Soul series or the Bible.
Earlier I mentioned that this book sometimes comes across as sickening. This can clearly be seen in this small excerpt:
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The contest continued evenly for a while, with both sides pulling and yanking and tugging and heaving, until poor Cynthia split right down the middle!
There was a terrible shriek of pain, then each team fell noisily into a heap on different sides of the line. Cynthia's Mother was still holding the left half of Cynthia, and Cynthia's father still held Cynthia's right half.
Cynthia's heart, however, fell out of her body and landed exactly on the line.
The policeman picked it up and placed it in a plastic bag. "I'll place this heart in safekeeping, thank you very much," he announced. "And now I declare the left half of Cynthia belongs to the mother, and the right half to the father. This proves again how fair the law is."
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The stories found in this book include things like; a lizard who protects anything near it from danger, a man who says various nonsense because of a curse, and a rich kid who switches places with a homeless kid for a few months.
Others will bore you with things like anorexia and dying in a stolen car. My least favorite was a story about a father and a daughter going for a walk. The path is filled with beautiful things such as unicorns. The father can only think of how he left the door unlocked and someone could have stolen everything in the home. In the end, it leaves you feeling like, "That was utterly pointless." or some other thing like that.
The characters all seem to be "just there." They don't have much in the way of likability, and are trying to get one thing done. They're like the characters in a fairy-tale or joke; puppets with a few lines. Often they are given personalities such as "concerned brother" or "loving wife." Unfortunately they are extremely one-sided and will never surprise you in their actions.
The settings are mostly one thing: Suburban houses. If it doesn't take place in a suburban house, it's on the street near a suburban house, or on a walk to and from a suburban house. The setting gets old. Also the book seems to take place in modern day, but it really can't feel like any time before the 1980's. The characters seem like `50;'s TV show characters, and very few modern-day devises are used. The result it is "timeless*."
The author's style was awkward. Sometimes the story read like a joke, and three things happen and the first two are almost identical, but in the third one, something different happens. Other times it leaves you wondering, "What the Heck?" because it assumes you know what he was thinking when he wrote it.
Other reviews are more lenient saying things such as, "...interesting concept but flawed in execution." One even said, "...could generate much discussion about self-perception, character, or symbolism." So it seems other reviewers liked it, but I (am in the target audience, and) found it to be drivel printed on nice paper.

Silverman, Mirror Mirror, 2002, The Chicken house

Wright, Ben, School Library Journal, Fletcher Free Library, 2002

Sherman, Chris, Booklist, American library Association, 2002

*And I don't mean that in a good way. I mean that it lacks any indication of time.