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 is 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