Mirror Mirror by Cara Delevingne with Rowan Coleman
published by Trapeze in 2017
Goodreads rating: 3.71 ★
My Goodreads rating: 3.5 ★
This definitely suprised me. I expected it to be badly written without much substance, because let’s be honest, most books by celebrities are. And I don’t blame them – they are extremely busy people already. How on earth would they find the time needed to write a masterpiece of a novel? Usually it pleases the fans and that’s it. I do like Cara Delevingne. I’m wouldn’t call myself a fan, but I am more aware of her ventures than most people probably. This is why I picked this book up. And although there were some things that I didn’t like – this book surpassed my expectations, which were quite low to be frank, even though I adore Cara. Experience with other ‘celebrity’ books influenced me, I guess.
In short ‘Mirror Mirror’ is about a group of four teenagers from London, who have to form a band for a school project, but soon realise that they are too good to quit the band afterwards. They become fast friends, although they would have never hung out otherwise. Everything is better than it ever was for each and everyone of them until the unthinkable happens and Naomi disappears. She is found in the Thames on the brink of death 8 weeks later. What happened to her?
From the blurb I figured that this was your basic mystery novel. It is that, but more. We delve closely into the lives of the characters. We are in Red’s head all of the time and that’s a very interesting choice that I cannot go into detail about, because that would be a huge spoiler. But I loved the idea of it. It showed me how much we are actually influenced by societal standards when forming a character in our head whom we know very little about. It only takes a few traits and hints about looks and that person is formed in our heads. It was quite fascinating to see Red change in my head from what I pictured from the beginning of the book to what I see now in just about 5 words. And I didn’t see that coming at all. Maybe it was there all along through little hints, but I didn’t pick up on a single thing.
You can definitely see that Cara was inspired by Paper Towns, which is a shame. Of course everyone is inspired by different stories when writing their own, but it shouldn’t be blatantly obvious. It should still be original, which Mirror Mirror is to some extent, but not enough.
The characters were a bit too stereotypical for me and honestly I don’t get why Leo and Red fancy Rose. She isn’t a particularly nice person, but get’s told by everyone how truly amazing she is. Maybe that’s the reason she isn’t a nice person – it got to her head. I really liked Leo and Red though. Ash was a bit too perfect.
As for the plot as a whole: it takes a long time to get going and I had an inkling of what had happened to Naomi way before the group did. I would have loved to be surprised by the solution to the mystery, but sadly I wasn’t.
What I loved most about the book was being in London again. The story is set close to where I lived when I was studying for my Masters Degree and it was lovely being there again if only in my head. How Red describes living in the city is just too precious. God, do I miss this city.
Side note: There were quite a few spelling mistakes / typos in this. Hopefully, someone will edit it again before the next print run.
Conclusion:
I realise that this review doesn’t make it sound like I actually liked this book. But trust me, I did, even with the obvious flaws. It just wasn’t a masterpiece. But it surpassed my expectations and opened my world a bit more and honestly that’s all I could’ve asked for. I think that it is still a good book to read for teenagers, mostly because of the choice of having Red’s point of view.
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