I’m looking forward to picking it up.

Thanks much for the BLUE MIRROR comment, Mike – it’s very much a book of the mask! One of my other YAs, GOING UNDER, is about performance of a different kind, but the doctor in that book shares a lot of the same, um, qualities of Cole in BLUE MIRROR.

Perhaps this is the wrong place for this comment, Kathe, but I’ve just finished reading your YA novel THE BLUE MIRROR and found it wholly convincing as to the character of your narrator, Maggy, and thoroughly compelling, and touching, as story. No puppets in this one (unless I’m missing something), but Cole is certainly wearing a mask, indeed inhabiting a mask, and the final scene between the two — face to face, that is — works awfully well.

It’s been a while since I’ve read a YA novel (perhaps the last was your own _straydog_, and I’ll confess, as a geezer in training, some surprise at the candid use of language that was once forbidden in the genre and also an honest grappling (sorry) with the issue of sex. I can see young people actually reading your books, however, and taking away something important about both growing up and healthy self-definition. Many thanks.