Mirka is just as wonderful in the sequel, which opens with her being desperately bored after her stepmother grounds her, and she winds up trying to do battle with her brother and stepsister, both of whom turn her down. In fact, she’s both, and those two archetypes manage to coexist in her without becoming a contradiction.
(I said it in my review of How Mirka Got Her Sword and I’ll say it again here: The depiction of Shabbos was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read in a graphic novel.) Best of all, she’s allowed to be imperfect without being portrayed as either a bratty child or an idealized rebellious preteen. Her faith and culture are large parts of her life, and while she does sometimes chafe at all the rules she has to obey because of them, they are presented as a rich part of her life, something to be celebrated rather than fought against. What wasn’t to love? Mirka, an eleven-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl, defeats a troll and wins a sword so she can fight monsters. I unequivocally loved the first book in the series. How Mirka Met a Meteorite is a little more ambiguous. It’s a difficult balancing act to maintain, I must be the luckiest woman in the world, since the sequels I’ve reviewed for this site have stood up magnificently. I think, in every review I write of a book that isn’t either standalone or the first in a series, I’ll be tempted to revisit that point, either to illustrate how the book I’m reviewing does its job perfectly or how it falls short. I’ve done a post on sequels before, and on the difficulty of making them both true to the original book while still building on the world and the characters.
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