My Outlaw

What begins as a promising time-travel romance--a young girl gazing into a 19th-century saloon though a mirror in her grandmother's modern day ballroom--ends with a frantic effort to pull the past and present together by changing the course of history in Miller's latest after Knights. The little girl, Keighly Barrow, makes an instant, spiritual connection with Darby Elder, the little boy in the mirror, and over the next two decades, they seek solace from their troubled lives in each other's images. When Keighly inherits her grandmother's house, she learns, by way of diaries and photos in an old trunk, that she and Darby had been married in 1887 and that he had died within the year. Keighly is once again propelled into Darby's world where she must find, in a few months, happiness to last a lifetime. Miller tugs at the heartstrings as few authors can, only here, she toys with the reader's trust by copping out to cliched themes and a contrived ending. (May)