Sixteen-year-old Saskia Brown, an outsider at her new school, discovers that she can use liquid mercury to visit boys in daguerreotypes in her dreams, and soon classmates are doing the same, with terrible consequences. After her parents' divorce and a cross-country move, Saskia Brown feels like an outsider at her new school: she's a transplant, biracial in a population of mostly white students. While visiting her only friend at her part-time library job, Saskia encounters a vial of liquid mercury, then touches an old daguerreotype and s somehow able to visit the man in the portrait: Robert Cornelius, a brilliant young inventor from the nineteenth century. The hitch: she can see him only in her dreams. After she shares the experience with some classmates, the other girls steal portraits of young men from a local college's daguerreotype collection and try the dangerous experiment for themselves. Each forms a bond with their own "Mercury Boy."At night the girls visit the boys in their dreams. At first, the Mercury Boys Club is a thrilling diversion from their troubled everyday lives, but soon jealousy, violence, and secrets threaten everything the girls hold dear. -- adapted from jacket
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