The Girl in the Mirror: A Novel in Poems & Journal Entries

About the Book

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.

Reaction to The Girl in the Mirror

KIRKUS (March 2012)

Before Lizzie McLane can search for her birth mother, she first needs to find herself.

In The Secret of Me (2005), a novel in verse, 14-year-old Lizzie began a quest to discover her place within her adoptive family. Three years older in this stand-alone sequel, also told in verse and journal entries, the now-high-school senior has started the process of looking for her birth mother. Her introductory entry briefly recounts the history of the prior book and delivers a shocker: Her father passed away on the same day that a letter with non-identifying information about her birth mother arrived from the adoption agency. Lizzie’s deeply felt poems depict her sudden downward spiral. She mourns the loss of what was and what could have been, joins her older coworkers in late-night partying and drinking and tries to reconcile her feelings about her old boyfriend and a sensitive, guitar-playing romantic possibility. When her change in lifestyle results in losing close friends and a near rape, Lizzie realizes that she no longer recognizes the girl she sees in the mirror. Kearney, an adoptee herself, ends with information about adoption support groups and resources. She also offers a guide to many of the poems’ forms (ballads, pantoums, villanelles, etc.) and structures.

Fans of Helen Frost will admire the attention to both poetics and story. (Poetry. 14 & up)

VOYA (July 2012)

The way Lizzie tells it, her life took a 90-degree turn. When she was born, her birth mother went one way and she went another—into foster care. She has come to realize, however, that she is proud her family was formed by choice. Her parents have promised to help her solve the mystery of her birth mother, and together they agreed that they would take that step when Lizzie turns seventeen. But the day the letter from the adoption agency arrives, her life takes another drastic turn—her father dies. So Lizzie writes, chronicling her journey through pain, loss, and discovery in poems and poetic journal entries. Journaling can be a rather dull exercise in self-absorption, but this novel in journal entries is just the opposite: engaging from the first. The author has created a character with a compelling and honest voice whose day-to-day experiences ring true. As the beautifully crafted plot unfolds, Lizzie, in her grief, takes a wrong turn but then finds the strength to right herself. Most fascinating of all is the way Lizzie’s intense personal narrative is so deftly expressed in various poetic forms, some formally rhyming and some free verse. She employs the ballad, the blues poem, the sonnet, and the pantoum, among others. Kearney explains Lizzie’s choices in her “Guide To This Book’s Poetics” at the end of the book. Affecting and intriguing, this novel stands with the best.— Marla K. Unruh, Reviewer

School Library Journal (July 2012)

Gr 9 Up—Lizzie McLane knows how lucky she is to be with her adoptive parents, but she’s curious about her birth mother. Her family requests information about her, but when Lizzie’s dad has a heart attack on his way to work, dying in the car, Lizzie’s massive grief stalls her need to know about the woman who gave her up for adoption. At first, the 17-year-old can’t even find solace in the writing and poetry that she adored. Her faithful friends are there for her, and her family tries to surround her with love even as they all grieve, but nothing brings her comfort. She tries to escape her sadness by drinking, partying, trying to get to “a place I call The World That Time Forgot,” and wondering about her birth mother. Eventually poetry seems to help. Told through verse and journal entries, this novel chronicles Lizzie’s journey of grief, her relationships, and her personal evolution. It’s beautifully and lyrically written, making the teen’s sorrow palpable, and the relationships and interactions feel real. Lizzie shows up first in The Secret of Me (Persea Bks., 2005), but this follow-up stands on its own. A section at the end explains the types of poetry included and the people, places, and agencies referenced in the book.
— Melyssa Kenney, Parkville High School, Baltimore, MD

HORNBOOK MAGAZINE (July/August 2012 issue)

Lizzie McLane (The Secret of Me, 2005) is on the cusp of an exciting future: high school graduation is right around the corner, and she has just received a long-awaited letter from the adoption agency with information about her birth mother. But her adoptive father unexpectedly dies that same day, and everything else falls away. It is with this excruciating event that Kearney’s coming-of-age novel in poems and journal entries begins. Lizzie loses interest in (and control of) her life, engages in dangerous behavior, and lets her most important relationships deteriorate. Despite her poor decisions, however, she never comes off as an immature, rebellious teen. Her problems are rooted in real, understandable pain, and due to the immediacy and palpability of her hurt in the sometimes elegant, at other times biting poems, we don’t blame her for a thing. Lizzie is wise, insightful, creative, and impossible not to invest in as she spirals down and then rebounds; we, too, breathe a sigh of relief as she feels “something heavy inside / begin, very slowly, to lift.” The poetic forms employed vary greatly (all explained in the appended “Guide to This Book’s Poetics”), but the voice is clearly and distinctly Lizzie through them all. The poems and entries are each strong enough to stand alone but smoothly coalesce into a beautifully wrought story with memorable characters and true-to-life issues.
— Katrina Hedeen

Publishers Weekly (June 2012)

www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-892-55385-3

“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.)

Kirkus (March 2012)

Before Lizzie McLane can search for her birth mother, she first needs to find herself.

Fans of Helen Frost will admire the attention to both poetics and story. (Poetry. 14 & up)

Book List /booklistonline (March 2012)

www.booklistonline.com/The-Girl-in-the-Mirror-Meg-Kearney/pid=5256732

At the heart of this YA novel is high-school-senior Lizzie’s search for her birth mother or, rather, the adopted teen’s conflicts about whether she really wants to search. Why did her birth mother give her away? Told in journal entries and many poetic forms––from villanelles and blues poems to free verse (all explained in detailed notes at the back)—this may be best for writers’ groups. Those who have not read the first book about Lizzie, The Secret of Me (2007), may sometimes find it hard to keep track of the huge cast of all her friends, family, boyfriends, and workmates. What will grab readers is Lizzie’s personal voice, the universal drama of coming-of-age, her grief at the death of her beloved father, and, especially, the tense confusion of her search. A powerful what-if poem captures her dread about meeting her birth mother: “What if she doesn’t like me? . . . What if she’s married and I’m her Big Secret?”
— Hazel Rochman

The Pirate Tree: Social Justice & Children’s Literature (April 2012)

www.thepiratetree.com/2012/04/19/the-girl-in-the-mirror-faces-grief-and-abandonment/

On the same day adoptee and aspiring poet Lizzie McLaine receives non-identifying information about her birth mother, her father dies of a heart attack setting her on a grief-fueled downward spiral. Without her father and in the face of her mom’s heartbreak, Lizzie reflects on her divided loyalties. She has, or had a great set of parents. Now she has one good mom. Now she doesn’t feel it would be right to search for her birth mother. Even though, she faces the girl in the mirror with so many questions. Who does she look like? Why did her birth mother give her away? Mother’s Day comes and Lizzie writes a poem entitled “Mother’s Day Poem/Decide Not to Give Mom.” In it, she asks, “what’s a mother’s love when given away…” But Lizzie’s grief over her dad’s death is as palpable and even more real than the woman who gave her birth. In her poem, “Without,” Lizzie laments, “Without his arm around my shoulder without his voice without kisses on my forehead without laughter at the dinner table” as she counts all the ways she misses her dad.

Lizzie numbs herself with alcohol and isolates herself from old friends, looking for people who can help her forget her own grief and confusion. At first, drinking works, but then, sadness returns and she writes, “For a little while I’d forgotten all my sadness—/the lemonade had brought on a kind of forgetfulness./Now there is that empty space/again, which nothing/can fill….”

In planning this novel, a sequel to The Secret of Me, a novel in verse that explores what it feels like to be adopted, author Meg Kearney says, “When an adoptee sets out to search, she has to be completely ready for anything….by delaying Lizzie’s search I was able to explore further her relationship with her adoptive parents. Her need to know who her birth parents are feels extremely urgent until she’s faced with the loss of her father. I think that’s when she comes to understand what her parents had been insisting all of her life—that she’s not their ‘adopted daughter,’ she is their daughter, period. And her father is her father, her mother her mother. There are two people somewhere out there in the world who gave birth to her, but she realizes they are not, and never will be, her parents.”

If Lizzie’s heart is to heal, she realizes she must take responsibility for her feelings rather than bury them. She must look abandonment squarely in the face to recover her own spirit and rise above her losses. In the process, she claims her love for her parents even as she recognizes her birth parents are out there in the world. This novel, told in the strongest poetic forms, looks at the complex issues of adoption but it is relatable to all young adults who face the death of a parent or even those who wonder how they will become who they hope to become.

Kearney, who teaches in the Solstice MFA in Writing Program at Pine Manor College, includes end matter on poetry and poetic form which will certainly encourage young adult readers caught up in Lizzie’s story to pick up their own pens and try their hands at their own writing.
— annangel

I love The Girl in the Mirror. It has honesty to the core; it is wonderfully written (narrow with news, fulsome with emotion). Its observations of others and the narrator herself strike me as simple with honesty and the truth of the situation in which Lizzie finds herself. The form strikes me as true—poetry and commentary, both intense and personal.
— Paula Fox, author of Desperate Characters and The Slave Dancer

Lizzie returns, now 17 going on 18. Her father, whose heart was a cause for concern in The Secret of Me, has died shortly before the novel opens and Lizzie is devastated. We sense the terror this child has of losing parents because her sense of loss of her birthparents is still a profound stone around her neck. Lizzie plummets into a nightmare world of alcohol and denial, surviving by writing poems and journaling so vividly that she brings us right along with her. The series of poems around her father’s funeral and the series of poems about her graduation party are stunning in every sense of the word. There is an honesty, a darkness, a steel fragility in these beautifully crafted words. I suspect there are few readers who would not be swept into the tornado of Lizzie’s destructive grief. Kearney fully engages the reader in this very fine coming-of-age novel.
— Karen Hesse, 2010 MacArthur Fellow, author of Out of the Dust

Meg Kearney has crafted an exquisite novel about a girl caught in an emotional storm of grief and yearning. Told through Lizzie’s pitch-perfect poems and journal entries, The Girl in the Mirror is inventive, heartbreaking, and transforming.”
— Laban Carrick Hill, author of Dave the Potter

Meg Kearney is a deft magician —sensitively weaving scenes and histories, lively conversation and internal reckoning, into a warm world of relationships. Her poems in The Girl in the Mirror feel comfortably vernacular, while embodying a surprising number of poetic forms. It’s amazing what Kearney does with presences and absences—people who aren’t quite there anymore remain potently everywhere—as Lizzie’s life unfolds. This book is a generous gift.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Habibi and There Is No Long Distance Now: Stories (forthcoming)

Young Adult Reader Reviews: Australia (YARR-A, March 2012)

www.yarr-a.com
Lizzie McLane, now in her college years, has finally found her feet after a difficult period of time in her high school years… until the day the letter about her birth mother arrives; the day her adoptive father dies. Flung into grief, and worry, and depression, Lizzie turns to alcohol and the wrong friends. Her day-by-day struggles to stay on top of life are expressed in this book of journal entries and poems.

Although the book only covers a very small amount of time in Lizzie’s life, it seems to stretch and detail every small event that occurs to Lizzie, both good and bad. This is a deep, emotional, and, in some ways, spiritual, retelling of an adopted girl’s story; definitely a novel that a lot of adolescents can connect with. It is quite unusual as a young adult novel to be written in verse, but it more than works. I would definitely recommend this book over and over again to any young adult. I give it a full five stars!
— Ronja, age 15, Canberra, Australia

Flamingnet Student Book Reviewer (February, 2012)

www.flamingnet.com
Lizzie McLane, schoolgirl, adoptee, and poet, is ready to head off to college. But, she is also not ready to stop searching for her birth mother….yet. But, on the day Lizzie finally has a breakthrough, her adoptive father dies, throwing her into a serious funk. Confused, and not sure where to turn, Lizzie gets mixed up with the wrong crowd. And with alcohol. Will Lizzie (and her poems) remain triumphant? Or will Lizzie dig herself a hole she can’t get out of? Full of drama, twists, and turns, The Girl in the Mirror, is a must read.

The Girl in the Mirror was enticing, and really, truly honest, giving you an inside look at the heart of a adopted teenage girl. The poems in this book were truly amazing, and the writing was so vibrant, I had to just stop and think about. Lizzie is a true heroine, and you cheer for her till the very end. Between relationship and best friend dramas, this book just kept me guessing. I, as a lover of poetry, truly enjoyed this book and its unique writing style. A must read for Ellen Hopkins fans, The Girl in the Mirror, is a true roller coaster ride.
—Reviewer Age:13, Reviewer City, State and Country: Silver Spring, Maryland USA (JWel1111)