Past starts to connect to present, and the characters find that when they act to try to change events based on their knowledge of the future, their actions are already part of the immutable past, a development that’s reminiscent of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler's Wife. Annie entreats Elsbeth to go to Kansas City and save Abbott, but as things start to go terribly wrong, Annie realizes that she needs to find a way to travel to the past and try to set things right. These various threads start to come together as Annie reads some news clippings in the original store file about the red door, and realizes that the magician, David Abbott, will be murdered in three days’ time for Elsbeth. Meanwhile, Cap’n, a gifted pickpocket in 1895 Kansas City who leads the local sandlot gang, sees a murder and realizes that she will be the next target of the menacing Mr. Christian is also dealing with his own issues, including hallucinations, a stutter and painful social awkwardness. A red door in Annie’s home, marked with mysterious symbols, and originally owned by David Abbott, a magician who lived in Kansas City in the late 1800s, seems to be the fulcrum of the time warp between Annie and Elsbeth.Īs Annie and Elsbeth develop their unusual pen pal relationship, Annie’s best friend Christian deals with the loss of much of his memory due to an accident in his past, and with his concern for Annie’s health, based on her paleness, her frequent nosebleeds, and his discovery of her correspondence with the California Pacific Medical Center.
She glances in the mailbox, finds Elsbeth’s grouchy letter dated 1895, and cheerfully responds, delighted with the mystery of their unexpected connection across time and space. Like Elsbeth, Annie is knocked on her rear several yards away when she tries to knock on the cabin door. She steps into her back yard and is completely bewildered by the sight of a cabin and a large field of wheat, neither of which, as far as she is aware, have any business being in downtown San Francisco. In May 1995, Annabelle Aster, a young woman in her late twenties who loves Jane Austen and dresses in Victorian-style clothing, takes a break from cleaning her beloved San Francisco Victorian home.
Incensed, she leaves a letter in the mailbox, threatening to use her shotgun to deal with this unwanted trespass. Elsbeth determinedly stalks over to the home to demand an explanation of this irksome addition to her back forty, but every time she goes to knock on the door, she’s immediately displaced back to the gate around the home. Full review, first posted on In May 1895, Elsbeth Grundy, a crotchety widow living in a cabin on the Kansas plains, sees a purple and gold-painted Victorian home that has unexpectedly appeared in her wheat fields.
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