When Mirrors Wake

When Mirrors Wake is a book that stayed with me long after I put it down. Etta Vale is the kind of protagonist whose small, concrete routines — the pot of tea cooling on the counter, the ledger sheets in her neat hand, the way she reads a city by its surfaces — make you feel you’ve lived in this world for years. The moment she opens the seam and finds Jonah on the other side is flawlessly rendered: shock, relief, and that terrible, impossible bargaining all at once. I cried during the public ritual scene: the crowd, the antiseptic bureaucracy of the Office of Reflective Regulation, and then Etta’s private sacrifice felt like two different kinds of grief colliding. What I loved most was the balance between the domestic and the civic. Ruth Kest’s “arrangements” felt mythic in a very human workshop smell of vinegar and lemon oil. The aftermath — policy changes, the messy way a city tries to legislate mourning — is handled with nuance. This is an urban fantasy that understands bureaucracy as a character. Highly recommended for anyone who likes quiet, character-driven speculative fiction with real emotional stakes.

Tightly written worldbuilding and a unique conceit make this one of the more interesting urban fantasies I've read recently. The city-as-surface idea is original: mirrors that keep lives, storefronts that store afterimages — those images stuck with me. The Office of Reflective Regulation as a bureaucratic antagonist is a smart structural choice; it turns what could be an intimate fantasy into a public problem and raises excellent moral questions about governance, consent, and who gets to decide what counts as a life. The pacing mostly works: the seam reveal (Jonah alive) is an excellent midpoint shock, and the public ritual in the final chapter gives a satisfying civic resolution. My only nitpick is that some of the mechanics around memory-transfer and anchoring could've used one more clarifying scene, but stylistically the prose is clean and evocative. Etta’s craft scenes — polishing, silvering, subtle “arrangements” — are a delight. Overall: smart, poignant, and thoughtful about policy as well as feeling.

This story quietly wrecked me in the best way. Etta's decision to keep the ember of expectation alive after Jonah's disappearance felt real — not theatrical grief but the kind that sits in the corners of your life (I loved the little details: the cold pot of tea, the lemon oil lingering in glass). The seam scene is heartbreaking: the logic of reflections holding lives is handled with enough specificity that when she opens it and finds Jonah, I believed both the miracle and the moral cost. The final sacrifice is painful but earned. I appreciated that the author didn't go for cheap catharsis; the aftermath is messy, bureaucratic, and tender in turns. If you like stories where the city is as alive as its people, this will do the work for you.

I came for the mirrors, stayed for the bureaucracy. Who knew an Office of Reflective Regulation could be such a delightfully moral grey antagonist? Etta is brilliant — the scene where she reads the afterimage in a shop window like it's a sentence to be translated was peak craft porn. The public ritual is equal parts solemn and absurd, and that messy aftermath (policy meetings, awkward committee memos) gave the book the comedic bite it needed. Also, props for the lemon oil details. Small things sell big worlds. Bravo 👏

I wanted to love this; the premise is gorgeous and the prose often lovely, but the execution left me frustrated. The seam reveal — Jonah alive across the reflective membrane — is a great springboard, yet the book spends too much time hovering in elegiac description and not enough on clarifying the stakes. How exactly does the memory-anchor mechanic work? The text hints at rules but then asks the reader to fill too many gaps, which undercuts the emotional payoff of the final sacrifice. Pacing is another problem. The slow, domestic opening (which I initially appreciated for atmosphere) stretches into the middle so that when the Office of Reflective Regulation becomes active, the political conflict feels underdeveloped. The public ritual is theatrically staged but the aftermath’s policy shifts are summarized rather than dramatized; legislative and civic change feels like an outline rather than a lived process. I also found some character work thin. Ruth Kest is fascinating in glimpses but oddly sidelined where she could've done heavy lifting (mentor conflicts, deeper craft lore). The ending is bittersweet, but I left wishing the author had trusted the world enough to show rather than tell more of the transformation the city undergoes. Recommended if you prioritize atmosphere and concept over tight plotting.

Pretty concept, a few good scenes, but overall the book reads like a halting sermon about grief. The moment of Jonah's discovery is emotional but telegraphed — you can see the sacrifice coming from a mile away. The Office of Reflective Regulation is a clever idea, but the resolution with the bureaucracy feels too neat; actual municipal politics are messier and nastier than depicted. I liked the glass-restoration details (the lemon oil, the ledger), but a few too many passages linger on craft minutiae at the expense of momentum. Felt like it wanted to be a meditation and a thriller at once, and ended up only halfway successful at either. Not a bad read, just not as surprising as it could have been.