"It was a dollhouse. So tall it nearly reached Miranda's chest and about four feet wide, the house sat squarely in the dust-filled corner—it seemed vaguely familiar to Miranda and she walked around it, puzzled, trying to place it. She crouched down behind it and realized she was looking into a scale model of her new bedroom, window seat and all. Of course, the dollhouse seemed familiar—it was a replica of her own new house, right down to the tiny bricks in the chimney and the molded front porch railings!"
Miranda Browne is the protagonist of the story, a young girl from New York City who finds herself in a completely different world when her family moves to a small town in Massachusetts. The move lands Miranda in a traditional New England house where the previously dazzling white clapboard has long since turned to a peeling grayish-white. Miranda's new home has all the iconic expressions of a traditional haunted house. In the place of spectral ghosts, however, the epicenter of the uncanny weirdness is a miniature duplication of the house in the attic. This quote represents the moment that Miranda first sees the dollhouse and recognizes that it duplicates the house in which it sits.
"She examined the black crayoned writing on the floor WATER. She puzzled over that for a moment. Then she peered out through the dollhouse attic windows into her own attic — at the suitcases now lined up under the eaves, the stack of lamp shades, the dressmaker's dummy."
This quote details Miranda's initial encounter with the uncanny quality of the dollhouse. She discovers that the replica of her new home from the exterior is more than matched by a much stranger mirroring on the inside. The first indication that something is very much not right inside the dollhouse is the crayon writing on the floor. More intensely disquieting, however, is the appearance of the dressmaking dummy. This mannequin and its appearance—and subsequent disappearance—becomes the key event to Miranda's understanding that the dollhouse is not entirely of this world as we know it.
"When she looked through the windows of the dollhouse kitchen, she could see into the kitchen of her own house as it had looked in other times. And not only the kitchen windows possessed this magic; she could monitor every part of their house by moving around to peer out of different little windows. When she settled herself in the corner behind the dollhouse and rested her arms on the dollhouse attic floor, she had only to keep her eyes trained through its windows, and the whole house's past became her present."
Miranda is drawn to the dollhouse and comes to discover its strange magical qualities have something to do with the uncanny passage of time. This quote actually helps to literalize the meaning of the book's title. The passage situates the premise of the narrative by summarizing the central element of the plot. By looking through the windows of the dollhouse, time is manifested differently for the viewer. Miranda is able to literally peer into the past from her point in the present. By looking into these "time windows" the little girl comes to understand that nostalgia for better times is very often not based on actual events, but a filtering of memories through the distorted windows of the passage of time.
