Okay. Suzy Lee, creator of the hypnotically joyful Wave and the quiet-but-noisy The Zoo
, has a new book. It's called Mirror, and it is wordless, and it involves a little girl who meets her reflection in a mirror. Shy at first, she warms up to it, until she is dancing with herself. The mirror is the right-hand page of every spread. Interesting. Clever. Such a good idea, I'm surprised I haven't seen it before.
But wait. About twelve pages in, it starts to go - oh, what's the word? - ukulelepants nutsteak coco-for-cuckoo-poops CRAYZAY. First, the girl's dancing prompts a Rorschach of exploding orange paint and spattering black ink. A little conceptual for many children and some adults, who may be concerned that something behind that kid is spurting flammable liquids, but I get the idea. Dreams made flesh.
And then the girl's dancing takes her behind the mirror, thus, in this book, into the fold. We get a couple pages of freaky symmetrical partial girls, which everyone (that I've shown the book to so far) finds disturbing, and for one frightening white two-page spread, she disappears entirely, before re-emerging from the fold. Whew. Except - now the reflection is no longer a reflection. Like Stevie Nicks in the Fleetwood Mac song, she can go her own way. Which irritates the original girl to no end - so much so that she spitefully gives the mirror a shove. The mirror falls, and breaks, and she is alone again, and huddles on the floor in sorrow.
Suzy Lee isn't your usual cranker-outer of picture books. From my short descriptions of her previous books above, you can see that there is always something contradictory and meditative about her work. It's like white noise that is also music. That's it: Suzy Lee is the Thom Yorke of picture books. And not everybody gets Radiohead, but you can't deny that it's art.
If you wanted to use this book as a discussion starter on resentment, competitiveness, impulse control, or remorse, you could. But I wouldn't, in kind of the same way that I wouldn't take a group to see Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring to start a discussion about the seasons. Or mountains, for that matter. Rather, I'd present this as the performance of a little story, told in drawings. It starts and finishes with the girl in the same huddled position on the floor, it ramps up slowly, there's a happy passage, a crisis... oh my god it's a book about dance! Hm. I should pretend that I knew that all along, shouldn't I.
Well there's a review that didn't go where I expected it to go. How often does that happen?
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