Sixteen-year old Piper’s father died of an incurable disease a few years ago. Her mother is an antiques dealer who moves house continually. She purchases old houses in need of a lot of repair, and, once the repairs have been done, she sells up and moves into another old place that needs to be refurbished. Piper has probably moved in and out of twenty houses in this way, but there is something in the new house that she has never encountered before.

Although there was nothing that Piper could have done to stop her father from dying, she feels guilty and, although she is usually very cheerful, she sometimes broods about why she couldn’t have done more to save him. She has three girlfriends at school, of whom the closest is Alison, with whom she shares an encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies.

In the most recent house they have moved into, Piper goes looking in the attic and finds a beautiful old mirror, decorated with cherubs, which, with her mother’s help, she polishes up and puts on her bedroom wall. Alison nearly immediately warns her about the malefic qualities of the mirror, but Piper is convinced that in some way her father is trying to contact her, that there is something he needs to say to her through the mirror, so she shrugs off Alison’s forebodings.

Alison is having problems with her boyfriend, Joey. Alison complains that Joey doesn’t return her calls. Eventually, it becomes obvious to Piper’s circle of friends that Joey has dropped Alison. Piper then finds herself in the strange situation where Alison, her best friend forever, her BFF, stops returning, or even answering, her calls.

Piper is a down-to-earth, no-nonsense type of girl, but however much she denies it at first, she comes to accept what Alison said about the mirror, that the weird and scary things that begin to happen in her bedroom and other parts of her house, but not in the kitchen, and even in her school car park are caused by the mirror.

Whenever something frightening is about to happen to Piper, Joey always turns up in the nick of time to prevent it. At first she is steadfast about not betraying her best friend, Alison, with Joey, but she gradually realizes that Joey is in love with her, and that whatever existed between Alison and Joey is in the past.

Torn between the feeling that she must destroy the mirror, and the wish that her father will use it to communicate with her; getting more and more worried about Alison’s absences, and Joey’s presence; Piper begins to investigate the mirror’s history. Who made it, in the first place, and why? She learns that she is not the first person it has tortured, or done even worse things to. She is determined to avoid the fate of the previous victims. She collaborates with new people, like a Goth girl in school, an old lady and a witch, to find out how to loosen the ever tightening hold the mirror is beginning to have over her.

This is just the beginning of the story. I won’t give away any more of the plot, just strongly encourage you, if you are interested in the YA paranormal genre, to read the novel for yourself.

I will say, however, that, at the end of the novel, there is a real reversal of everything you think you have understood. It’s as if a mirror has been held up to you, you say, yes, I now understand, and then the mirror is smashed into smithereens, only to be put back together in a way that makes you do a 360° turn in order to take in that what you were so sure of was not the truth. Mirror, Mirror ends in a way that will certainly give nightmares to young adult, or even mature adult readers. In Mirror, Mirror, there are reminiscences of both Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, and Denis Wheatley’s satanic horror novels.

Majanka Verstraete is a 21-year old Belgian author, who writes in English. But I wonder if she hasn’t lived in the United States for a few years? The young adult vocabulary, the school setting, the relationships between Piper’s and Alison’s friends, the school football players, all ring very true of a North American high school.

The Bottom Line

Mirror, Mirror is a highly enjoyable page-turner of a Young Adult paranormal novel, constructed around a powerful plot and very visual writing. I had the impression I was watching the film of the novel as I read it. It would make a very effective young adult horror movie. ( )

review to come