The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore
I’ll keep this as spoiler free as I can, but it’s a very character heavy book, so ideas about what constitutes a spoiler may vary. If the premise interests you, I highly recommend just diving in. Also upfront, this book (and thusly this review), has sexual assault as a major theme. I think I cover how it’s handled fairly well here, but if you need more details, please feel free to lmk.
I don't really know where to start with this book. I tried several times to come up with something, only to find myself flailing, partly because in general I find it easier to talk about books I didn’t like than ones I did lol. The Mirror Season is one of those books that you don't realise is making you feel things, then you get to the end and start contemplating your life choices.
The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore is a YA magical realism book following Ciela, ‘La Bruja de los Pasteles’, a young woman with the ability to tell exactly what kind of pastry someone needs to make their life better. After Ciela is sexually assaulted at a party alongside a newcomer to town, she must reckon with her own struggle toward recovery and her feelings of responsibility towards her fellow survivor.
Often, stories about sexual assault focus overwhelmingly on revenge or putting a stop to the perpetrator, sometimes even the wider societal webs that survivors are just sort of… a part of. One of my favourite YA books, Girls of Paper and Fire does this - brutally deconstructing the systems that allow abuse to happen, acting almost as a rallying cry for the reader, giving voice to their rage.
The Mirror Season, on the other hand, gives voice to survivors’ grief. Of course there’s rage there, and there are perpetrators. The real life social consequences and wider reaching systems play a big part too, but underlining it all is Ciela, whose narration is as devastated as it is devastating.
There is a deep truth here, one that I don’t think I’ve ever seen explored with as much nuance as McLemore manages. As much as it’s a book about assault and healing, The Mirror Season is about one thing above all; identity. Over two-hundred-and-forty-nine pages, we watch as Ciela grapples with a personhood that has been irreparably damaged by what happened to her. She can’t go back to who she was before, and we get to go with her as she figures out who it is she’s going to be.
Of course, all this fantastic character work is backed up in a way that all the best books are by a confident and easy mastery of the craft. I haven’t read any of McLemore’s other work, but I was unsurprised to see that there was a lot of it. Their prose is absolutely gorgeous, and the novel works on every level, with character, prose, worldbuilding, and the (incredibly sweet!) romance plot all building off of each other to create a delightful whole.
There are, as with any book, flaws. Some parts feel just a little bit too polished, with the story feeling like it’s perhaps intruding a little on the natural process that the characters are going through. There’s also a huge emphasis on reporting, creating a false equivalence of ‘reporting’ and ‘recovery’. In real life, the link between the two is rarely so clean cut, and it’s important for survivors of sexual violence to carefully examine their own circumstances in order to reach a decision that’s right for them.
I could see a less patient reader growing frustrated with the vagueness surrounding the magic of the world, and answers aren’t always what seems logical. It is very much a soft magic system, which works fantastically for the story, tying theme and emotion together beautifully, but if you’re looking for a book concerned with logic and rationality, you won’t find it here. I loved this about it, but many readers won’t. This is very much an empathic read, not a logical one.
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