This is our only non-vintage mystery but it is a book that has charmed and captivated readers for more than a quarter century now. Look at the reader review comments on the large internet book companies and you will find well over a hundred reviews, averaging five stars, in which readers proclaim it “the best book I’ve ever read” again and again, some going on to say that they named their children after characters in the book or stole their first copies from the local public library. Of course how could you not be intrigued, as one reviewer pointed out, by a novel in which “you find the main character marrying her own grandfather and giving birth to her own mother”? Such is the situation in Marlys Millhiser’s classic novel (a Mystery Guild selection originally published by Putnam in 1978) of two women who end up living each other’s lives after they look into an antique Chinese mirror. Twenty-year-old Shay Garrett is not aware that she’s pregnant and is having second thoughts about marrying Marek Weir when she’s suddenly transported back 78 years in time into the body of Brandy McCabe, her own grandmother, who is unwillingly about to be married off to miner Corbin Strock. Shay’s in shock but she still recognizes that the picture of her grandfather that hangs in the family home doesn’t resemble her husband-to-be. But marry Corbin she does and off she goes to the high mining town of Nederland, where this thoroughly modern young woman has to learn to cope with such things as wood cooking stoves and—to her—old-fashioned attitudes about sex. Shay’s ability to see into the future has her mother-in-law thinking she’s a witch and others calling her a psychic, but Shay was an indifferent student at best and not all of her predictions hit the mark: remember that “day of infamy” when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor—Dec. 11, 1941? In the meantime, Brandy McCabe is finding it even harder to cope with life in the Boulder, Colorado of 1978. After all, her wedding is about to be postponed due to her own death—at least the death of her former body—at the age of 98. And, in spite of the fact she’s a virgin, she’s about to give birth. And this young woman does have some very old-fashioned ideas about sex, which leaves her husband-to-be—and father of her child—very puzzled. The Mirror is even more of a treat for today’s readers, given that it is now a double trip back in time. Not only can readers look back on life at the turn of the century, they can also revisit the days of disco and the sexual revolution of the 1970’s. So how does one categorize The Mirror? Is it science fiction? Fantasy? Supernatural? Mystery? Romance? Historical fiction? You’ll find elements of each but in the end it’s a book driven by that most magical of all literary devices: imagine if…

Order This Book