The Blue Mirror

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