15. Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror
By Marilyn Singer
Illustrated by Josée Masse
Dutton Children's Books, 2010

Genre
Poetry, Picture Book

Awards

• Goodreads Choice Nominee for Picture Book (2010)
• Cybils Award in Poetry (2010)
• Horn Book Fanfare Best Poetry Book list (2010)
• Betsy Bird's 100 Magnificent Children's Books of 2010
• Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Books of 2010
• Booklist Editor's Choice list (2010)
• Washington Post's Top 15 Books of 2010
• NCBLA - Notable Children's Books in the English Language Arts (2011)
• ALA Notable (2011)
• Texas Bluebonnet Award Nominee (2011-2012)
• Flicker Tale Children's Book Award Nominee for Picture Book (2012)
• Land of Enchantment Picture Book Award (2012)

Review
A beautifully illustrated picture book of poems that can be read up to down, or down to up! Author Marilyn Singer writes poems about fairy tales that can be reversed, showing a completely different poem.  While made in the form of a picture book, older audiences will enjoy her poetic style as well as younger children.  Singer even challenges her readers at the end of the book to make up their own reversible poem.  The illustrations are colorful and eye-catching, also showing both sides of the story that is told by the two poems opposite the picture.

Opinion
This book is skillfully written, though the poems aren't as amusing as I thought they would be.  I feel like this poem style is limiting with the choice of vocabulary as the sentences have to work both backwards and forwards, even though the punctuation can be moved around, but the poems are still vague and sometimes difficult to understand, like they were just words and ideas from a specific fairy tale put into a poem, hoping to flow well, but not succeeding (like the poem entitled Mirror Mirror).  However, some of them were very enjoyable with The Doubtful Duckling, Bears in the News, and Have Another Chocolate being my favorites because of their clever way of telling both sides in a way that didn't necessitate having a picture to know what was going on.

Ideas
The author challenges her readers to try their hand at making their own poems like this.  This would be a fun activity for most of the ages in the tween group, letting them use this book as an example.