Mirrors & Smoke

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