As some of you may or may not know, my favorite book of all time is Time Windows by Kathryn Reiss.
The book is about thirteen-year-old Miranda Browne, who moves with her mother and father from New York City to tiny, quaint (fictional) Garnet, Massachusetts. Miranda is at first ambivalent about the move, but things change when she discovers an old dollhouse in the attic that duplicates her new house in miniature. Even more surprising, she finds that when she looks through the windows of the dollhouse, she can see into the past and can watch the day-to-day activities of the families who lived in the house before her.
Miranda's fascination turns to bewilderment when some scenes begin to repeat themselves within the different families--the same dialogue, sometimes verbatim, recited by different people, decades apart in time. The bewilderment turns to terror when her own loving mother begins to exhibit the same angry, bitter, abusive tendencies of the woman who lived in the house during the Victorian era.
With the help of Dan Hooton, the fourteen-year-old boy who lives across the street, Miranda must not only solve a decades-old mystery but also figure out how to save her mother from the house's seemingly evil influence.
I first read Time Windows at age thirteen. A friend and I were visiting her grandmother in Maine for a week, and we did a book swap for the trip. By the end of the week, I'd decided that I needed to have a copy of this book of my very own. The little paperback copy I purchased went everywhere with me: school, dance recitals, car trips, doctors' offices, the beach ... basically, any time I thought I'd be sitting long enough to open a book, Time Windows came along. By the time I reached college-age, one of the covers had torn off.
I decided to purchase a replacement copy, and my dad convinced me to go for the hardcover. My sister then asked me what I was planning to do with the paperback. Upon being told that I was going to toss it, she told me she'd like to have it.
If you skim through the customer reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, a good chunk of them are people who read the book as kids and still reread it to this day, or people who read it as teenagers and are now sharing it with their nieces/nephews/own children. So, clearly, it's not just me.
But why? What is it about this one book that has touched so many people? And why should a book I read the summer after 7th grade still be my favorite book all these years later?
Part of it is, at least for me, that this is the kind of adventure I always wanted to have as a kid. Well, I could do without the ghost possession and the finding-a-mummified-body stuff, but the rest of it? Oh, man, did I wish this story had actually happened to me. Maybe it's just because I grew up in an old house, but I always wondered who had lived in the house before me. Were they happy? What did they look like? How did they live their lives? Less philosophically, how did they decorate the rooms? How did they use the space? Was my dining room their dining room? And so on. Having the opportunity to see all of that would have been freakin' awesome.
Another part of it is the story itself is completely up my alley. It's equal parts enchanted object story, ghost story, and mystery, along with a smattering of budding romance. It's a fantasy that's real-world-based, with the characters acknowledging how really freakin' bizarre everything is. It's a magical mystery that is so grounded that with very little suspension of disbelief, your average kid will want to believe that something like this could happen somewhere.
The final, and I think most important, part of it is that you never once feel like Kathryn Reiss is dumbing down the story simply because she's writing it for kids. This is a very intricately-plotted and detailed story, focusing on three separate time periods that at the same time oppose and parallel each other. It has mystery, intrigue, romance, creepiness, and discussions on history and the effects of the past on the present. It deals with child abuse and the lengths some people will go to to attain their dreams and desires.
It's filled with elements that your average kid is not going to pick up on. For instance, one of the characters is depicted taking off with a man who is not her husband. I understood, at 13, that the character was walking out on her husband and child, but it wasn't until a few years later that I glommed onto the fact that the character had been having an affair with Not-Husband. That was a very "Whoa!" moment for me, and I think it may have been the first time I realized that this book was more than just a teen ghost story.
There's no denying that there's just something about Time Windows. I'd read plenty of books before it and I've read plenty of books after it, and I keep coming back to Time Windows. I reread it every year or so, even though I know the story so well that I really don't even need to read it anymore. And I've discovered, as I've looked critically at my own The Witch of November, that I've tried to inject it with what makes Time Windows so special to me: that sense of adventure, that sense of "maybe, just maybe, this could have happened."
So, tl;dr version of above: Time Windows by Kathryn Reiss is nothing short of magic, and I highly recommend it.
