This is an oldie, but a book and author I have read more than once. If you’re a fan of history, time travel, and/or body-switching, you will love this one. Millhiser published fourteen novels prior to her death in 2017 in Boulder, Colorado. This is her best-known work. I’ve also read her books The Threshold (set in Telluride, Colorado) and Nightmare Country.

Because both Millhiser and I reside(d) in Colorado, the setting in Boulder in 1900 and 1978, resonated with me. (I moved to Colorado in 1985, in my early 20s.)

Shay Garrett is about to marry in 1978, against her parents’ wishes. She is pregnant and plans to go through with the wedding when she stands before a family heirloom: a full-length, standing oval mirror with a large crack running through it.

Her grandmother, Bran/Brandy, lives with the Garretts, but has been unable to speak since a stroke she had around the time of Shay’s birth. When Shay looks in the mirror, thinking she is seeing herself, it is actually Brandy she sees, on the eve of her wedding day in 1900. The mystical happens then and there—the two women switch bodies and times.

Try to picture a 1970s free-spirited woman exchanging lives with a Victorian virgin! For both women, a major shock, not just to them, but to everyone who is intimately connected with them. Could YOU fake it?

Millhiser had a deep knowledge of the historical place and time in her novels. She also understood what would make these two women tick when placed in an out-of-time situation. Being related gave Shay and Brandy points of reference to ground themselves, but the idea of living out the life of another person (including giving birth to one’s own mother) had to be unsettling in the extreme.

There are plenty of plot points and historical events to keep you enthralled, and though the body-exchange/time travel premise has been done (overdone?), this one has held up well over the years.