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Adrienne Stevenson
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Mirrors & Smoke Paperback – Aug. 5 2023

by Adrienne Stevenson (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 5 ratings
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Rebecca Plummer is a Canadian herbalist and midwife with a shameful secret and feminist outlook, caught up in the War of 1812 in Niagara, Upper Canada. Rebecca struggles to keep her family and community together despite wartime deprivation and gossip.

A story of courage, strength, and resilience

Mirrors & Smoke captivates from the start and delivers a moving tale of perseverance in the face of tragedy. Rebecca Plummer is a healer, midwife, and caregiver to women whose strength has been diminished by childbearing, near starvation, and abuse. In 1812, when the United States invades Canada, Rebecca’s dedication to healing is put to the test. Told from multiple perspectives, the reader is given interwoven views of the war, and contrasting perceptions about Rebecca and her life. Based on real people and historical events, this fictionalized account is told from the Canadian perspective and presents a rarely seen view of life in war-torn, rural Canada.—Donna D. Conrad, award-winning author of House of the Moon: Surviving the Sixties


Mirrors & Smoke tells the remarkable story of Rebecca Plummer. Life is not easy for a healer and midwife in Upper Canada in the early part of the nineteenth century, especially one who wants to improve the lot of women. Inevitably, such desires bring her more enemies than successes.

Adrienne Stevenson presents us with an oh so realistic, yet fictionalised, account of those turbulent times from the perspective of a woman living in Niagara in Upper Canada. With more enemies than friends, Rebecca navigates the anti-feminist repression of the time with intelligence, determination and a capacity for hard work. The chaos brought by the US invasion in 1812 multiplies her problems. Her skills must turn from saving the lives of injured soldiers to saving her own family as the turmoil causes both friend and foe to reveal their true nature.

As I read on, I became more and more involved with Stevenson’s artfully crafted characters. It was a jolt to realise the author had not actually lived through those times, although she must have immersed herself in every last detail. Stevenson brings a light and poetic touch to this important subject matter without hitting us over the head with the underlying serious theme.

It is refreshing to see a book about the war of 1812 that reveals the wider effect on the people of the time and how a woman might achieve her goals against her political adversaries and the agonies of war raging, albeit slowly, around her.—Brian Wyvill, author of The Second Gate series
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  1. Print length
    556 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    Aug. 5 2023
  4. Dimensions
    15.24 x 3.2 x 22.86 cm
  5. ISBN-10
    1778223346
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1778223341
  7. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Equae Books (Aug. 5 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 556 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1778223346
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1778223341
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 735 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 3.2 x 22.86 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 5 ratings

About the author

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Adrienne Stevenson

Adrienne Stevenson

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Adrienne Stevenson lives in Ottawa, Canada. A retired forensic toxicologist, she writes poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in over sixty print and online journals and anthologies in Canada, USA, UK, Europe, India, and Australia. Adrienne is an avid gardener, voracious reader, amateur genealogist and sometime folk musician. Her debut novel "Mirrors & Smoke" was published in August, 2023.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
5 global ratings

Top reviews from Canada

PR
5.0 out of 5 stars A Canadian "Gone With the Wind"
Reviewed in Canada on October 22, 2023
Verified Purchase
This well-written and engaging book is told from the point of view of Rebecca, an unmarried Englishwoman whose station in life limits her prospects unfairly. When she's offered the chance to come to the wilderness to help her brother-in-law care for her nieces, she recognizes it as her best alternative. She works hard to make a life for herself and win the love and trust of her new family and community as they face the uncertainty and privations of the times. In Rebecca, Adrienne Stevenson has created a brave and thoughtful heroine to rival Scarlett O'Hara, and a tense and emotional story of ordinary people in war on a par with "Gone With the Wind."
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Richard Grenon
4.0 out of 5 stars A fine novel of a sadly ignored era
Reviewed in Canada on January 30, 2024
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Beautifully written and meticulously researched, the story covers the years 1809-1815 and takes place along the still sparsely populated Niagara Frontier area of the new colony of Upper Canada. The main protagonist is Rebecca Plummer, an herbalist and midwife in her early forties who, when we first meet her, is living with her widowed brother-in-law, the Reverend Robert Addison, and his two grown daughters. Even though the story is told from multiple view points, Rebecca's is by far the most important and it is her relationship with Addison, as the two of them navigate the tensions, tragedies and occasional joys of the time and place they live in, which propels the narrative and keeps the reader interested. Adding to that interest is the fact that several of the characters are historical individuals, including Addison who, as well as being Upper Canada's first Anglican minister, was a dedicated and highly regarded missionary, Joseph Willcocks, a one time up and coming Canadian politician whose frustration with the colonial administration, along with his own vanity, led him to commit armed treason, and John Norton, the Mohawk chief who fought for both the British crown and his people and who may well have been Upper Canada's true saviour in the darkest days of the War of 1812. All of these characters, real and fictional, stay with the reader and help to paint a piece of Canadian history that has, over the years, been sadly ignored.
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JTO
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read
Reviewed in Canada on May 6, 2024
This book brings to life a key period in Canadian history. The reader experiences the daily life and struggles of people in the colony of Upper Canada through the voice of the main character and other characters lives through third person storytelling. The details and easy flowing writing style make this an enjoyable read as well as an educational one. Well done, anyone interested in early Canadian history and a good story will enjoy this novel.
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Peach Akerhielm
4.0 out of 5 stars Time Well Spent with People in 1812
Reviewed in Canada on November 24, 2023
This book did a great job of placing me into the War of 1812, a period of Canadian history we mostly hardly remember. Author Adrienne Stevenson must have read widely before putting pen to paper. You get a real dunk in the issues and attitudes of the time, and learn about who the combatants were on the Canadian side. She also knows her geography, and how rivers, canals and the lay of the land played into the war strategies of both sides.

Something new to me - and a good thing - was learning how crucial our indigenous people were in the battles and the war overall. Stevenson does not try to write indigenous characters in detail but makes it clear that without the various tribes who fought for the Americans or British, it would not have been much of a war. General Brock was widely admired, for example, but got himself killed off early in an unwise manoeuvre.

Its strong points of this book lie in its realism and accessibility, in terms of the war itself and the characters presented. The war's sweep and main events are made bite-sized, easy to digest, frequently through the device of having characters report them back to others. It allows the tides of back and forth in the attacks and battles to be discussed intelligently, with no patriotic bombast or bloodthirstiness. It’s good; it’s credible. After all, these are bright people trying to survive and hang onto a hard-won existence, their homes and lives.

Stevenson’s main characters are believable, too: a midwife who lives with her minister brother-in-law and is frustrated by the strictions imposed on her as a womn, but unwilling to challenge them. An Irish-born soldier trying to rise in the ranks, an apprentice printer finding challenge as a British agent, an unlikable political striver who turns to supporting the American side. Their opinions may differ from our own nowadays, but they feel like real people. As the war goes on, they do what we would: strive to protect young ones or look after their friends, make a living, link up with someone to love, get ahead or put food on the table. They feel like neighbors; you find yourself interested in how they will pull through.

The weaker points? Probably a matter of taste, here. For me, Stevenson situates us geographically and historically very well, but offers few striking pictures of the appearance of characters, their houses or the smell of the horses they ride in on. I miss that. Part of the fun of historical novels for me lies in lapping up sensory impressions of bygone times. Again, I like adventure novels. For a book set in a war period, a bit of swashbuckling and less on interpersonal relations, domestic scenes and the contents of pantries or herb cupboards would be nice. Again, scenes only rarely offer real suspense, once when an important hiding place for British agents might be discovered, and another during a night sortie by soldiers.

But although there is little here to make a reader's pulse pound, you do end the book with the worthwhile feeling that you have been with real people who lived through a hard time during a real war. And maybe you were with them. The writer indicates she was drawing on her own family's history.
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Top reviews from other countries

Jenny G
5.0 out of 5 stars A Piece of Little Known History Told Brilliantly
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2023
Verified Purchase
The thing I love most about reading historical fiction is learning more about places and pieces of history that I didn't fully appreciate before. In this book, Adrienne Stevenson does a brilliant job immersing us in the war of 1812 - from the Canadian side, and from the point of view of the strong and engaging Rebecca Plummer, among others.

Many American's don't realized the US invaded Canada during the War of 1812. This book follows not only the travails of Rebecca Plummer as she works to keep her family and her community safe, but includes an entire cast of point of view characters that help illuminate the politics and the humanity behind the war.

Readers who like to be immersed in history, becoming part of the story through the eyes of the characters, will love this story and recommend it to others.
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