This is an excellent book by R.L. Stine.It's Max's birthday. It's raining, so his plans of playing volleyball and having a BBQ are shattered. What can he and his friends (and his annoying 10-year-old brother) do to have fun and keep busy? They decide to explore the attic. They have fun looking at the old magazines, old clothes, and ... a secret hidden door? They find a small, secret chamber with a big, full-length mirror. The mirror has a light over it, and when you turn on the light, you turn invisible. When you turn off the light, you reappear.The kids think this is a hoot. They love turning the light on, becoming invisible, and pulling pranks on each other. But Max is a bit hesitant. He notices that the longer you stay invisible, the longer it takes to come back and be visible again. Also, you start to feel fuzzy, disconnected, and drawn towards the mirror the longer you're invisible. Perhaps the mirror is more dangerous than they thought?I really enjoyed this book, mainly because Stine indulges in a rare bit of characterization. Usually Stine's characters are interchangeable and forgettable, but I really felt Max was more fleshed out. He's obsessed with his hair, he loves/is annoyed with his obnoxious little brother, he has a tiny crush on the fearless girl next door, and he's pretty analytical. Usually I find it hard to string together even two adjectives to describe a Stine character, and here I am with a whole bevy of them for Max.The horror is also good and well-developed. Again, I think it helps Stine's horror to make children the protagonists. Children are pretty helpless: adults control them, adults have power, and often when a child tells an adult something (especially something supernatural) the adult just brushes off the kids as "telling tales" or having a vivid imagination. This makes the reader more concerned and anxious for the child protagonist, who is not a free agent, but instead at the mercy of the adults around him or her. It's always clear in Stine books that the child is on his/her own - s/he'll have to figure it out for himself/herself.One of the best things about this book is Max's feelings and how they affect (or don't affect) his actions. He's worried about the mirror. He knows it's causing some strange effects, and he's worried that one day the invisibility that he and his friends treat as a toy will become permanent. But when he tries to tell his friends this, most of them laugh it off. They keep peer-pressuring him to grant them access to the mirror and often make competitions of who can stay invisible for the longest amount of time. Max KNOWS this is dangerous. They have no idea how the mirror works or what it's doing to them. But, as a 12-year-old boy, he feels pressured not to be seen as 'chicken' by his friends and (even more importantly) the girl he's crushing on. Max gives in to his friends pleas for the mirror again and again and again, even though he knows better and actually stays up for hours at night worrying about it. I found this realistic and scary.Another point in the favor of the 'horror' in this book is mirrors. Mirrors, haunted mirrors, evil mirrors - this is creepy. Who hasn't played Bloody Mary? Who hasn't deliberately avoided looking at a mirror in the dark - waited until the light was on to look at yourself? There have been a few 'evil mirror' movies, some more successful than others (I didn't really find OCULUS to be that scary, MIRRORS (2008) was a better film, IMO). (view spoiler)[ In this book, the people in the mirror, the "reflections", want to come out and replace the 'real' people. A few of Max's friends get replaced and try and force him to disappear, too. The reflections get sucked back into the mirror when Max's little brother, Lefty, breaks it with a softball. But Lefty hangs onto the doorframe, and it's only later, when Max is playing catch with him, that he realizes Lefty is throwing right-handed. DUM DUM DUM!!! The mirror's origins and how it works is never explained. Given the bizarre and sometimes lame explanations Stine usually comes up with, I'm actually grateful for this - in any other author's book it would annoy me. (hide spoiler)]
Up in Max's attic, lies a secret closet door. In it was a mirror that seemed old and dusty. Why had it been there for so long without anyone touching it? Max and his friends find why this old mirror has been sitting there untouched for a long time. It wasn't just any old mirror that reflected yourself when you looked at it, it was able to turn you invisible. Turning invisible was fun for a while until Max found out that the mirror held a parallel world. Everytime he would turn invisible another version of him would get closer to coming into Max's world and Max stuck in the mirror forever. This book did give me a shock when I realized that there was a reason why that mirror was hidden. Everything fun in the world has its limit, even turning invisible may have cost you to be imprisoned in a mirror forever. The most shocking part is what happens in the end, when Max's brother does get trapped inside the mirror with the other brother in his world now. I wish there was a continual to this book to see how he would get back his brother here.
What do You think about Let's Get Invisible! (2003)?
Reader beware you're in for a scare!I'm gonna read like it's 1994! I was 6 when I first started these books, borrowed 'Night Of The Living Dummy' from one of my friends and I was hooked from there. I read them all through the 90's and loved them. I only stopped when the 'Goosebumps 2000' series came out but I'm not sure if that's because they were rubbish or I was just getting older and had started to lose interest. I don't think I read this the first time round, nothing about seems familial. The kids started getting on my nerves. Max kept giving into peer pressure, grow a pair Max! And the ending didn't make much sense. While I applaud Stine for not always having a happy ending, why didn't Lefty's reflection go back in the mirror when it was broken? Everyone else's did! Apart from that, the story was alright. I think it would still hold up for kids today, except they might wonder why they are playing instead of looking at their phones.
—Redfox5
Max's birthday party was supposed to be held outdoors, but the sudden rain kept everyone inside. When he, Erin, and April are exploring Max's attic while waiting on Erin's mom to come pick Erin and April up, they stumble across a hidden room containing an old mirror. When the light atop the mirror is turned on, whoever is standing in front of it vanishes--turned invisible!That's strange enough, but when Max has been invisible for too long, he starts to feel odd, like the mirror is pulling him in. Could there be more to this mirror than meets (or doesn't meet) the eye?The sixth book in R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series, Let's Get Invisible! offers a much more fantastical story than the previous book, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb. Max is concerned about whether the mirror is really safe, but his friends only seem interested in competing to see who can stay invisible the longest, and his little brother, Lefty, only wants to use it to pull pranks.Let's Get Invisible! is at least as well written as the previous book in the series, with a more interesting story. The characters didn't grab me as well as Gabe and Sari in The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, but they're not bad--though I admit it took me a few pages to realize that the girl nicknamed 'Mouse' wasn't the shy one. That's what I get for making assumptions.(Spoilers removed. The full review, including spoilers, is available here.)Let's Get Invisible! is a good book, with a different kind of horror than the usual monsters-and-danger kind. It doesn't seem to be available for the Kindle, but it's not hard to get it used, so you can still read it, if you like. Give it a try!
—Tracy Poff
This book is about a boy named Max. On his birthday he finds a mirror & when he pulled on the light switch he turned invisible! When he turned off the light, he became visible again. His brother tried it and when he came back out, there was something definitely different about him. This book is really scary and suspenseful. I couldn’t put it down until I found out what happened in the end. What do you think is going to happen? Will someone disappear forever or will they get trapped in the mirror?
—Nadia
