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A 20-year-old Boulder girl stares into her grandmother’s Chinese mirror on her wedding day in 1978, faints and comes to in her grandmother’s body–in 1900–about to be married to a miner. As she moves through life, even giving birth to her own mother, she becomes known as a fairly decent seer. Had she paid more attention in school, she would have been a great one.
Imagine switching lives with your grandmother and giving birth to your mother. In this ultimate time-traveling thriller, written by the now deceased Marlys Millhiser, that is exactly what happens. Newly re-released, this 1979 novel has not lost the magic housed in its pages. I have read this book every couple of years like I would visit a friend who lives out of state. Not just because time travel and mischievous mirrors intrigue me, they do of course, but because the world Marlys created was so encompassing I fell into her novel each time as if I had never read the book before.
Brandy McCabe fainted before a mirror gifted to her on the eve of her wedding. In the morning her father would give her away to a man who did not love her, Corbin Strock, happy to rid himself of his daughter who had a loose tile and no prospects of marriage at the ripe old age of thirty. Shay Garrett also stood before the same horrid mirror made of intertwined hands eighty years later on the eve of her wedding and fainted. As lightning swirled around the night sky of Boulder, Colorado, Shay and Brandy switched lives unaware of their relationship to each other both only recognizing the Gingerbread House built by Brandy’s father.
Read in chronological order, Shay fell back to 1898 in time to marry a man who died decades before her birth. Forced to leave the only thing she recognized from the past, the Gingerbread house, she moved with Corbin to his shack in the mountains with his mother Thora K. Everyone thought Brandy was a little off kilter, and now with Shay inhabiting her grandmother’s body, everyone in Brandy’s life thought she had lost a few more marbles as she often spoke about events yet to happen. The mirror did little help as it taunted the two women swapping them for a few moments before sending them back to live the other’s life.
Shay trapped in her grandmother’s body lived out the life of a woman unused to modern conventions such as dishwashers, telephones, and refrigerators. Before long, her first marriage ended and Shay found herself in love with a grandfather she had never met. She gave birth to her uncles and her own mother resigned to a life inside someone else’s body. Until baby Shay was born, which caused old Shay in Brandy’s body to have a stroke and she did not speak another word until she caught her granddaughter gazing through the looking glass. Back in 1978, Brandy McCabe woke up in the willowy body of her granddaughter. Her funny ways were even funnier in the future. Those in the life of Shay recognized the personality differences quickly and threatened to send Brandy to a mental institution. Understanding the stakes, Brandy ran with Shay’s body from her too modern fiancé and Shay’s overprotective parents. She found her way to an old farmhouse with a strange but caring old man. Shay’s parents searched high and low for their daughter only to find out she had died the same day as Brandy.
I do not want to give away the secrets locked up inside this book. Nor can I say enough about the writing and the storyline. If time travel or switching lives books make your imagination dance than this is the book for you. I would love to see this movie turned into a book except I am afraid someone would take too many liberties and ruin the premise. Nobody messes with my friends and gets away with it.
Once you read the first chapter about the mirror and the strange family, you will not be able to move on with your life until you read the last page. Despite the older generation, the plot is beyond intriguing and full of wonder for this current age. We certainly have more in common with those in the 1970s than in the 1890s. At least in the seventies, they had radios, cars, and televisions. Poor Shay had to learn to use an outhouse and a cave to keep food cold. This is why most the book focused on Shay trapped in Brandy’s body because the learning curve was so daunting. Oddly enough, Shay handled the transition better than her grandmother handled the future. Either way, what a story! Check out this oldie but goodie.
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