The Girl in the Mirror: A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries (Karen and Michael Braziller Books)

Lizzie McLane, the adopted poet-heroine of the widely acclaimed The Secret of Me, is now a high school senior, excited about her future: meeting boys, college, and finally finding her birthmother. Then, on the day a letter from her adoption agency arrives, her adoptive father unexpectedly dies. Lizzie, lost in grief, turns to alcohol and the wrong kind of friends, and her life begins to spiral out of control. Loved ones try to help, but only in her poems and journals can Lizzie make sense of the hurt and her relentless curiosity about her birthmother.

     I looked in the mirror . . .
     Who was that girl staring
     at me, blood on her blouse, black under her
     swollen eyes? I don't know you, I said out loud.
     I don't know you, she said back.

The Girl in the Mirror is a story about love and identity--brave, vulnerable, and compelling.

"'It was April first, a trick!/ Mom's voice said Dad was dead./ He couldn't walk through that door./ I thought it was a joke,' says high school senior Lizzie McLane, first seen in The Secret of Me (2007), in this introspective novel in verse about grief and biological origins. Nothing could be more devastating for Lizzie than her adoptive father's fatal heart attack: with the support of her parents, Lizzie was going to seek out her birth mother. Now nothing feels important. It's only through writing journal entries and poems, which range from free verse to pantoums, that she slowly feels her way through the darkness. With grace and honesty, Lizzie shares the blurry aftermath of her father's death-the wake, the funeral, and graduation, followed by a summer of numbing her pain with alcohol. Kearney tenderly explores Lizzie's anger, sadness, and ambivalence about her identity as she grapples with whether to risk being hurt by the mother she never knew or to approach the future without first claiming her past. Ages 14-up. "
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An adopted teen's search for her birth mother is overshadowed by a wrenching loss, dramatically told through her poems and journals.

Meg Kearney is the author of The Secret of Me and The Girl in the Mirror. She teaches at Pine Manor College and lives in New Ipswich, New Hampshire.