Time Windows by Kathryn Reiss opens with 12-year-old Miranda moving with her mother and stepfather into an old Victorian house, Hard Scrabble, in a small town in Massachusetts. While exploring the attic, Miranda discovers an antique dollhouse that is a replica of Hard Scrabble. As she peers into the miniature windows of the dollhouse, Miranda is astonished to find herself looking into scenes from the past involving the house's previous inhabitants.
As Miranda looks through these "time windows," she unravels the house's history. She witnesses various scenes, including the everyday lives of a Victorian family, a boy named Josiah from the 1920s who lived in the house, and even her mother as a young woman. However, the most intriguing and alarming scenes Miranda observes involve a young girl named Abby and her nanny, Dorrie, who lived in the house during the early 1900s.
Through these time windows, Miranda learns that Dorrie practices witchcraft and has been using Abby as a medium to communicate with the spirits of her deceased children. When Dorrie's rituals go awry, Abby's spirit becomes trapped in the dollhouse, and Dorrie dies under mysterious circumstances. This revelation leads Miranda on a mission to free Abby's spirit from the dollhouse. Along the way, she enlists the help of her new friend Dan, who also has a personal connection to Hard Scrabble's history.
The novel's climax occurs when Miranda is transported through a time window into the past, where she witnesses Dorrie's dangerous ritual firsthand. Miranda can finally intervene, freeing Abby's spirit and breaking the cycle of the haunting past.
As the story concludes, Miranda, having solved the mystery of the dollhouse and resolved the past tragedy, begins to feel more at home in Hard Scrabble. She grows as a person, learning about the complexities of human nature, the importance of friendship, and the value of confronting and understanding the past. The novel ends with the suggestion that Miranda's adventures with the dollhouse and time windows might be far from over.
