Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1042210 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Amazon.com 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

From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up--Maggy, a gifted artist, keeps a sketchbook called "The Blue Mirror" that shares its name with the coffeehouse where she regularly nurses a cappuccino for hours and draws what she sees. Tourists, bicycle cops, and especially the homeless kids or "skwatters" are her regular subjects. The 16-year-old crosses this metaphorical mirror (just like Alice in Through the Looking Glass) when she meets an attractive skwatter who takes a keen interest in her. Staring into the deep dark eyes of Cole, Mags forgets about her disastrous home life and feels as if she has finally met someone who understands her. She soon learns, however, that Cole is no Prince Charming, and she must find the strength to escape from his clutches. What makes this novel distinct is the stream-of-consciousness prose style that creates the illusion of everything happening at once, with Mags seamlessly slipping into and out of her mundane world and into "The Blue Mirror" with Cole. While her mother tends toward the stereotypical drunk who takes up space on the couch, and the secondary characters are a bit sketchy, Mags is a plucky protagonist, and readers will appreciate the ingenuity she musters to address her problems. Fans of Carol Plum-Ucci's What Happened to Lani Garver (Harcourt, 2002) and outsider themes will appreciate the gritty urban scenes and rhythmic language that give the book an almost surreal ambience.--Kelly Czarnecki, Bloomington Public Library, IL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Gr. 9-12. Koja's writing talent, hinted at in Straydog (2001), reaches remarkable fruition in this cautionary tale of infatuation. Maggy, a talented, 17-year-old artist who spends long hours sketching at a local cafe, notices a beautiful boy of extraordinary grace (and dark blue lipstick) through the window. Eventually she and Cole meet, and she falls head over heels in love. Despite the well-meaning advice of a friend, Maggy is unable to see Cole's considerable flaws, and the relationship spirals downward until a tragedy finally forces her to see what is really going on. The familiar plot of first love gone awry is not particularly special. It's Koja's writing that is noteworthy. Long stream-of-consciousness sentences with creative (but recognizable) spelling and clever use of italics will enchant readers, while the atmospheric cover art will draw teens seeking stories about extraordinary experiences. Debbie Carton
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Somewhat cluttered but amazing story
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.

the Blue Mirror
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

Good book
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.