The Blue Mirror by Kathe Koja

Hardback: 978-0374308490, $16.95

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.