The Blue Mirror »

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

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.

Publishers Weekly

The title takes on many connotations in Koja's (Buddha Boy) eerie, psychologically gripping urban tale. The Blue Mirror doubles as the name of the caf where narrator Maggy Klass seeks refuge from the claustrophobic apartment she shares with her mostly drunk mother, but it also becomes the filter through which she begins to see clearly the world outside-and herself. Her only friend, Casey, works at the caf ; Maggy's booth is "the one right under the window, blue-tinted window almost as big as the wall, showing caf and street in equal reflections." From her perch she draws everything she sees, and signs her drawings "mags" ("mags is my secret name, my alias or nom de plume or whatever an artist would call it... even Casey doesn't know about mags"). One winter day, she spies "Prince Charming on a street corner." After a time, she discovers his name, Cole, and he leads her out of her sacred space in the Blue Mirror to his world of the streets. Koja creates an indeterminate urban setting, grounded in specifics. Cole takes Maggy to the Wishing Well, where he compares its ice crystals to "trapped stars"; he shows her the riverbank where the "skwatters" stay; and he calls her mags ("How do you know my name?"). The novel teems with characters that possess the same kind of edgy, dangerous magic as Francesca Lia Block's creations, and, like Block, Koja explores the confusion between infatuation and real love-in all its cruelty and its redemptive powers. Ages 12-up. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.