Review of Mirror Girls by Kelli McWilliams
The Most Moving YA fiction novel I’ve read in a very long time.
I’ve had this book for several months and have been really looking forward to reading it. Kelly McWilliams is the daughter of Jewell Parker Rhodes, who has been one of my favorite YA authors for many years. I learned of this book from seeing a tweet from Dr. Rhodes on Twitter promoting a giveaway of Mirror Girls when it was first released. I entered and thought nothing else of it, as I NEVER win things like that. Yet a few weeks later, I received a message asking for my shipping address, and sure enough, the book arrived at my door not long after. By then, I had read some of the early reviews of this book and was more excited than ever to read it.
But life and working on my master’s degree got in the way, and it was just this month, while off on winter break from my job as a reading interventionist, that I was able to pick it up and settle in for a good read. I was NOT disappointed. In fact, Mirror Girls far exceeded my expectations.
“Fix what’s been broken”- Mama said
I expected a story about twin sisters (one white and one black) that were separated at birth and werereunited during the Civil Rights movement in the South. What I found was a haunting (quite literally) and powerfully moving historical fiction novel in which the themes of love, family bonds, and bravery are masterfully woven to tell a tale that is both horrifying and beautiful at times.
I am typically NOT a fan of sequels, but without spoiling anything, at the end of this book, I found myself wondering where the characters would be in their lives five, ten, or twenty years down the road. Because of the subject matter of the time, this wasn’t always the easiest book to read, but that is the power of it…McWilliams depicts just how unsettling and terrifying it was to be a person of color in the south in 1953.
I would definitely recommend this book for middle school-aged readers, and I think adults will get just as much from the story as well. Overall, an excellent novel, and it will certainly not be the last of Kelly McWilliams books I read.
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