Gaiman and McKean's Mirror Mask Novella Not as Magical as Movie

Brilliant Fairy Tale Flattens Out on Page

Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived with the circus. She wanted to run away to join real life, but her mother told her she couldn't handle it. In a moment of pique, she wished her mother dead, and her mother did indeed fall ill.

That night, the young girl had a dream, full of strange, half-human characters out of her artistic imagination. The dream denizens needed her help to find the Mirror Mask, a fabled object that would wake the comatose Queen of Light and stop the Queen of Darkness from taking over the land. So the circus girl went on a quest through the land of dreams. She awoke much more mature, able to handle real life after all.

Such is the plot of Neil Gaiman's new young-adult novella, <i>Mirror Mask</i>, written in collaboration with Dave McKean. Sounds like your average coming-of-age saga, right? The tropes of the Quest and Coming to Age have been overused, especially in the fantasy genre, but ‘Mirror Mask' gives new life to these mythic themes.

First, instead of being a stupid ingénue, our heroine Helena exhibits more courage and presence of mind than most characters, male or female, that I've read about recently. She figures out the vagaries of her dream world rapidly, with a quick wit, then uses them to her advantage. She outwits a riddling Sphinx by ad-libbing her own confusing, amusing joke. Though temporarily brainwashed by the Dark Queen and her creepy music-box minions, she triumphs at last with her pointed perceptiveness and juggling skills that make her such an interesting character. Frightened by nothing, dryly witty, the 15-year-old Helena is truly a modern, even feminist, heroine.