WOW. I loved how this book featured a mixture of romance, mystery, and historical fiction. It was obvious that the author had spent an incredible amount of time researching each of the time periods featured in this book. The quality of the descriptions of both settings and characters were amazing.

At the start of the book, Michele is presented as a fairly typical, average girl who just happened to be born to the runaway only daughter of one of the few remaining elite New York families, the Windsors. The one thing that seems paranormal about her life is a recurring dream that features a handsome young man.

Then tragedy strikes. This was actually one of the few parts of the book that I had trouble accepting. It just seemed so random, which then led to it sounding forced. Michele's mother, Marion Windsor, gets into a fatal car accident just after dropping Michele off at school in the morning. Michele is then sent to live in a mansion in New York, with the famed grandparents that she's been alienated from all her life. And this is where the story really begins.

Michele finds a key among several valuables that had been in her mom's safe deposit box. This key is identical to the one that she is always wearing in her dreams, and it quickly guides her to an ancient diary in a locked drawer, that Michele realizes once belonged to her great-great-aunt Clara Windsor, the first adopted Windsor daughter. Michele brings the diary and the key together, and she is suddenly launched back in time, to New York's golden age of the early 19th century. Here she meets the boy from her dreams, the heir of the Walker family, the Windsor family's biggest rival. Their romance is passionate, true, and sweet, but it is also limited, because Michele Windsor and Philip Walker live in completely different time periods.

From here on in the story, Michele's daily life with her strict grandparents is peppered with visits to the past to meet the one person who makes her feel truly alive. I was blown away by the sequences of the book that take place in the past. The author's ability to paint such a captivating picture of decades so far in the past was incredible.

The last few chapters were AMAZING. Every single detail mentioned in the story has a purpose, and that is realized in the end of the book. The puzzle of how the future changed the past was simply entrancing. I ABSOLUTELY ADORED THIS BOOK.

*Cover: Okay. Not wonderful.*