Short novel about teen artist angst and bad boyfriend problems, a little on the supernatural side. ( )

Short novel about teen artist angst and bad boyfriend problems, a little on the supernatural side. ( )

unremarkable story of disaffected youth. Luckily, it's short, so it moves quickly. ( )

Maggie flees to The Blue Mirror, a café that serves as her sacred space, nightly to escape her drunk, depressed mother. There she nurses a drink and spends most of her time drawing the things and people around her, translating them into her own world, which shares a name with her café hide out.

It's there that she meets Cole, a dreamy stranger who makes something inside her sing. Leader of a small band of street kids he's exciting, dangerous and manipulative. And he swears he loves her.

After the questionable, uncomfortable love story of the Twilight books it's refreshing to have a fictional voyage into twisted love, framed by adult issues that teens are being forced to face more and more, and dreamy, hyper-flowing prose. This is one powerful book, despite it's short length and should be a must read in the modern overload of relationship dramas in young adult fiction. ( )

Maggy, sixteen, has one sacred place to escape: The Blue Mirror, a coffeehouse where she can draw and escape from the burden of her alcoholic mother and the burden that loneliness places on her. This is another story about how easy it is to lose yourself in a relationship. Just as it happens in many other books (and in real life), these relationships suck you in by degrees, a little at a time, so that you wake up one day and wonder, "How did I get here?" Although I didn't LOVE this book (the story's good, but it's a style thing with me), I did like how the true nature of the Cole relationship still left a lot of doubt in Maggy's mind - that's realistic. I don't think it's possible to instantly stop loving someone just because they're tragically flawed, so I appreciated that the author didn't write it that way. ( )