A wonderful tantalising blimps of how to help make the world a better place. Should be required reading for teens and older. It made me weep because since this was published we’ve actually got worse in this country.
Short and sweet.

The Broken Mirror is a completely different yet fully literary enjoyable work created by Jonathan Coe, an author I am always delighted to discover.

It was first published in Italian, French, Greek and Dutch before being translated into English three years ago. Considered ´A Fable´ it is more than a children - midgrade level - book as it deals with the ginger balance between dreams and reality, real world versus the power to dream the change.

It is located in the town of Kennaway, a real town in Fife, Scotland, where Jonathan Coe´s grandgrandparents used to live, but as the author himself explains, there is no connection with the real place.

Claire, the fictional character of The Broken Mirror lives somewhere in England. As a child, in a garbage heap, she finds a fragment of a mirror that projects the creations of her imagination into her real world. ´How could something that she could see so clearly not be real? How could the mirror be showing things that were twice as exciting, a hundred times more magical tghan the dull, wokaday world that was all around her?´

Year after year, she is facing the pangs of growing: discovering the injustices of the world, being bullied in school, retreating in her world from her quarelling parents, feeling in obsessive love with a guy who utterly ignore her. Around her, there is a new world expanding, where the small stores and libraries are destroyed for the sake of ´great´ real estate projects encouraged by a mayor that pretends to put the hometown ´first´. Immigrants are the target of street attacks.

She mostly ignored the fragment of mirror that makes the world better. Until one day, when Peter, her secret admirer, shares with her the secret of his fragment of mirror. And they are not alone, it seems that there are more and more people that together, will try to put the fragments together trying to show ´how the world might look if it was a better place´. What one can see in the full miror is in the eye of the beholder.

The Broken Mirror is an encouraging read in dark times, both political and generally human. It relies upon us the power to hope and to do not give up the checking once in a while the projection of our worlds into the mirror. It helps although it might not change the surroundings - not right now.

The illustrations, by Italian artist Chiara Coccorese are collages, which is such an appropriate way to introduce dreams and wishes. Aren´t they made of disparate fragments of ideas, concepts and projections?

I liked the idea of this book but did not enjoy the execution and experience of reading it. I am not a fan of the artwork and I think the story lost traction at a number of parts throughout. Overall I can't say I'd recommend this to readers.

I requested this as it was billed as a fable for children and, while I will use it for school, I'm very glad I read it for my own enjoyment. A beautifully illustrated book of 80 pages this is a perfect book for the post Brexit, Trump lead America that we find ourselves in.

A real departure for Coe but an absolute must for everyone. I will look to buy this in print as I would like to marvel at the illustrations and hold the hardcover in my hands.

I had to put this down. Between the story line, which I wasn't enamored of, and the computer graphic images that I found uninteresting, I gave up about a third the way through. The main character didn't feel like a child to me, some of her reactions seemed abnormal, and the story was taking too long to take shape. This fable was obviously not written for me.

Hmmm… billed as a fable, and with lovely computer graphic-styled montage illustration, this comes with a vocabulary to alienate a lot of the potential children in the audience, and a very wishy-washy structure. It starts wonderfully with a young girl finding a broken fragment of mirror that shows her a wondrous alternative reality. But then spots, bad men who do things like develop towns, bad crushes and more all get in the way of her life and soon she can't see the fabulous for the ever-encroaching grey of her lot – only for the book to lurch into lefty parable at the end. I don't know what she wanted, really – she already had parents so laissez-faire they let her romp around with a broken shard of mirror as a pet, for crying out loud. And I can't help notice the ill-fitting, and ill-thought, way the developers are lumped in with racist scum – this is a book that seems to think building new developments and more modern housing and so on is something best left to Nazis. It's that kind of children's book.