The Key, The Magic Mirror, and The Topaz Ring - Softcover

Dodge, Jeanette M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 146623458X ISBN 13: 9781466234581

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011

Synopsis

Honored with the 2011 Moonbeam Children's Book Award, this book won the Silver Medal in young adult fiction, historical/cultural. Seventeen-year old Sarah James receives a secret key at her Great Grandmother Rose Chandler's deathbed where she is told to unlock a hidden room. In the mysterious room, she finds an antique mirror with a spell. The mirror pulls her into the past where she relives her grandmother's life as a young pre-Civil War woman, who built a cotton plantation and raised a family with Hugh Chandler. The Chandler family history continues to unfold decades later when Sarah's twin grandchildren, Drew and Sarah, discover the magical mirror which also transports them back in time. They relive the Civil War (or as they call it, the War of Northern Aggression) through the eyes of Paul and Sarah, also twins, learning the secrets of the Chandler Plantation and what life was like when the Yankees invaded their ancestral home. A love story unfolds in the third chapter of this novella, when Dr. Karen Marshall is summoned south by lawyer Stephen McGuire to arrange a funeral in the Chandler family. Karen finds herself under a spell, she's no longer herself, can't understand why she keeps remembering things she couldn't possibly know, with feelings she shouldn't have. Her mysterious connection to the Chandler Plantation and her ownership of a unique topaz ring bring her life into focus.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeanette M. Dodge is an award-winning author honored in 2011 with a Moonbeam Children's Book Award, Silver Medal, for her third book, The Key, the Magic Mirror, and the Topaz Ring. Young adult fiction, the book is a trilogy of short stories, a mystery romance, that takes its characters back in time to the Civil War period. The book includes illustrations by the author's daughter, award-winning artist, Mary P. D. Heintzman, of Salem, Oregon. As a poet, the author was honored in 2003 by the International Library of Poetry, named Outstanding Poet of 1994 by the National Library of Poetry, recipient of the Golden Poetry Award of 1992 in the World of Poetry Anthology and the Award of Merit Certificate in 1990. She published her first children’s story Seven Cats Named Spot in 2008. Written as an heirloom gift to her children and grandchildren, it is about life with farm pets in the 1950s. In 2009 she published Song of I Am and Other Seasons in Life which pairs a lifetime of poetry with her artist-daughter Mary P. D. Heintzman’s award-winning art. Dodge's poetry reflects the influence of the 19th-century Jesuit priest and poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. Dodge was born in 1921. She is of pioneer stock with great grandparents among the first settlers of St. Charles, Illinois, in 1835. A product of the Great Depression she worked in high school to earn tuition for Cook County School of Nursing and became an R.N. in 1944; as a nurse, she paid her way through University of Illinois where she received a B.S. in journalism in 1949. She married Jay True Dodge in 1948, had her first four children and went back to the U of I, receiving her master’s in English in 1962. While raising eight children in Peoria, Illinois, she taught English at Bradley University.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 146623458X
• ISBN 13: 9781466234581
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Smith Cynthia Dodge
• Illustrator: Heintzman Mary P. D.