Carrie Firestone, author of The Loose Ends List and The Unlikelies Ultimately, it’s like mercury itself-mesmerizing, terrifying, thrilling, and dangerously beautiful. It’s full of secrets and fraught with danger. “ Mercury Boys has daguerreotypes and dashing strangers, hiding spots and crossed lines. But all good things must come to an end, and it’s not long before jealousy, violence, and lies threaten everything the girls hold dear.

At first, the club is a thrilling diversion from the girls’ troubled everyday lives. During the day, they hold clandestine meetings of their new secret society: the Mercury Boys Club. Then, each of the girls tries to make contact with her own personal “Mercury Boy,” from an injured Union soldier in the Civil War to a charming pickpocket in New York City.Īt night, the girls visit their “forever boyfriends” in their dreams. They steal portraits of young men from a local college’s daguerreotype collection. Under Saskia’s guidance, the other girls try the experiment for themselves. Saskia soon shares her revelation with some female classmates. The hitch: she can see him only in her dreams. She is somehow able to visit the man in the daguerreotype: Robert Cornelius, a brilliant young inventor from the nineteenth century. When high schooler Saskia Brown plays around with a vial of liquid mercury, then touches a tattered old daguerreotype, she makes a startling discovery. Publisher Soho Press, August 2021 – a lovely YA mesmerizing story!

Mercury Boys by Chandra Prasad