Like all good horror stories, this moves from the familiar and the credible to the fanciful and disturbing...the drama is tense, the writing superb

Violent and relentlessly-paced. Mirror is major Masterton, which is to say that it's a fat and juicy read!

A fast-moving plot, well-defined characters, graphic horror and unstoppable thrills

The reader finds himself viewing the story more as a motion picture than as a novel, and it moves just as rapidly. The author blends reality, superstition and fantasy in just the right amounts to make MIRROR believable and deeply chilling

Graham Masterton will curdle your blood

Rarely is a first novel as smart and engaging and learned and funny and moving as The Borrower.

Makkai takes several risks in her sharp, often witty text, replete with echoes of children's classics from Goodnight Moon to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as well as more ominous references to Lolita...the moving final chapters affirm the power of books to change people's lives even as they acknowledge the unbreakable bonds of home and family. Smart, literate and refreshingly unsentimental.

Rebecca Makkai takes all the best features of the children's books her characters love and sweeps them straight into her first novel: their warmth, their vibrancy, their joy at setting their inventions in motion and following them wherever they might lead. She is a generous, original, and arresting writer, and any story she wants to tell, I want to listen.

She's a great writer...a wonderfully entertaining story packed with moral conundrums and beautiful writing

Ian is a little star. His many sayings and observations that he'll burst out with are endearing - and often funny. It's clear that Lucy is smitten by her favourite 'borrower.'

This story - often fun, sometimes sad, always bookish - deals with big issues...Rebecca Makkai's literary debut will appeal to young adults and readers of adult literary fiction

In Makkai's picaresque first novel, Lucy, a 26-year-old children's librarian, "borrows" her favorite patron, bright, book-loving 10-year-old Ian, after his fundamentalist parents enroll him in a program meant to "cure" his nascent homosexuality.