I Will Keep Shrieking Until You Read This Book

I will say up front that this book comes with big trigger warnings for sexual assault and, to a lesser extent, bullying. It is an easy book to read because Anna-Marie McLemore’s prose is gorgeous and rich while still being sleek and light. It’s an incredibly hard book to read because of what it’s about, which is two teenagers who start out as strangers meeting on the worst night of their lives, during which they are both sexually assaulted. It follows them through the stutter-step process of reaching a full understanding of what happened to them and how it affects them and their friendships and their relationship to each other. It’s unflinching in its depiction of healing as an uneven, nonlinear process that takes time and is never entirely finished.

The Mirror Season isn’t a plot-heavy book because it’s so much about what’s going on with the characters, and it gives them space to process and interact and think and breathe, which is something I feel like I find only rarely in genre books. There’s a lot of push for things to be pacy in SFF, which makes it really stand out to me when I find a book that’s so completely focused on character.

Also, if you are even a tiny bit into baking, this book is an absolute feast. Which feels like a strange thing to say about a book built around recovery from sexual assault, but there’s very consciously a lot of joy in the pages of The Mirror Season to balance out the pain and anxiety. The main character, Graciela, works at a pasteleria and has a magical ability to tell exactly what kind of pan dulce every customer wants. In the immediate aftermath of the assault, she loses her power, but then slowly recovers it as part of her own healing. And the baked goods she describes! I spent a lot of this book absolutely desperate for a concha.

I’ll be thinking about The Mirror Season for a long time. Difficult, beautiful, and necessary.