Mirrors

As Cooling points out in her introduction to this newly commissioned collection of short stories, 'mirrors and reflections have played their part in stories from the ancient tales...to today'. It kicks off, appropriately, with Elizabeth Laird's retelling of the Narcissus and Echo myth, 'The Fateful Mirror' and ends with Berlie Doherty's 'The Girl of the Silver Lake' about a girl who, like Narcissus, doesn't want to grow up. In between these fantasies of self sufficiency are many different takes on mirroring. In Malorie Blackman's 'Watching' the reflection is persecutory while in Melvin Burgess's 'Whose Face Do You See?' it is an affirmation of existence. Vivian French's 'Selim-Hassan the Seventh' and Jeremy Strong's 'Never Trust a Parrot' are sure footed comedies in which mirrors can be revealing in extraordinary ways... In this varied collection some stories are sparkier than others but, overall, there is an appealing freshness to the way these stories play with a powerful theme.