The Blue Mirror

Rating:
Summary: Back and brilliant as ever.
Review: 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.(...)

Rating:
Summary: Good writer, okay book
Review: Though "The Blue Mirror" was a disappointment for me it was wonderful to actually be reading a Kathe Koja book again; she's a splendid writer and I've missed her. I so enjoy her stream of consciousness writing style and love the gritty, seedy, creepy world she always takes me to, rich with good small details and a lushly unpleasant atmosphere. I grew up poor in a hideous slum apartment with a mentally ill mother, and this book took me back there to Gardenia Avenue and made me remember the pink lipsticked cigarette butts filling the sinks, the roaches in the bathrooms at night. "The Blue Mirror" gets my two and a half stars for all of those good things. What I didn't like about the book were the characters - though I felt some sympathy for Maggy none of them were real people to me, they were flat and frankly uninteresting - and the lack of action/strong plot in the book. Maggy meets some people, hangs out with them for a while, and then they go their separate ways. That's really about it. Aside from having sex for the first time with strange Cole Maggy undergoes no grand awakening, has no epiphany sweet or sour; she still doesn't see the point of school or make any move to get away from her black hole of a mother in the end of the book. I found the ending, wherein Cole is driven away by a glimpse of Maggy's portrait of him in her notebook, to be pretty contrived; because Cole isn't a well fleshed out character we don't know why he'd react that strongly, and I didn't believe it when I read it. Most of all, I wish Kathe Koja was still writing horror/supernatural fiction. All of her work is infused with the macabre and scented by the weird, and I long for her to return to it and give us something unimaginably ghastly.

(...)