In Sergio Silveira’s A Breathtaking Life, Laura lives a comfortable life with her husband Edward, yet she secretly retreats into elaborate romantic daydreams that distance her from her daughter Jenny. After Jenny’s death, Laura begins seeing disturbing visions in the mirrors where she once indulged these fantasies. One night, she steps through a mirror and awakens in the body of Lucynda, a servant in her own household, while another version of herself continues in her former role. Forced into hard labor under Mrs. Spriggs, Laura discovers that certain mirrors can open in moonlight and that a bracelet tied to Lucynda’s past may unlock a path between worlds. As Jenny faces boarding school in this altered reality, Laura is determined to reclaim her place and change her daughter’s fate before the seductive figure drawn from her fantasies can trap her in an illusion.

Sergio Silveira’s A Breathtaking Life Lived in Daydreams is a unique story! I was expecting something along the lines of Alice Through the Looking Glass, but this is something wholly different and intensely realistic, driven a great deal by the author's own experiences. The settings feel so alive. A Victorian world of colonial affluence, garden rooms, and servants rising before dawn for Haymaking Day prayers. For all the carefully constructed world-building, the soul of this story is about motherhood, and even without the Highland warriors and pirates, the greatest fear of any parent is losing their child to situations that we, ourselves, have put in motion. I loved Lucynda, who is the one counterpart to Laura who might be able to prevent Laura’s exile from her own life. Lucynda represents the unsettling, symbolic change in inherited assumptions about who leads, who serves, and who ultimately safeguards the future. Overall, this is a well-written and deeply thoughtful novel.

A Breathtaking Life Lived in Daydreams: A Novel About Daydreaming by Sergio Silveira follows Laura, a woman whose inner world is more vivid than the life she outwardly lives. Laura confesses her secret habit of escaping into elaborate romantic fantasies in which she becomes the object of fierce devotion from imagined figures such as the Highland warrior John Haeger-Smyth and the pirate Pierront. These inward “lives” offer her the intensity and agency she does not experience in her marriage to Edward or in her role as mistress of a grand household. Yet her constant retreat into mirrors and reveries distances her from her daughter Jenny, whose longing for her mother’s attention becomes one of the novel’s most poignant threads. When a strange and unsettling event seems to transport Laura into the body and social station of Lucynda, a young servant in her own home, the story deepens into a meditation on identity, privilege, and consequence.

The writing in A Breathtaking Life Lived in Daydreams is lyrical and introspective, often unfolding as an extended interior monologue that mirrors Laura’s restless mind. Sergio Silveira's richly detailed fantasy sequences sharply contrast with the rigid social hierarchies and domestic expectations of Laura’s daily life. Dialogue carries emotional weight, especially in scenes between Laura and Jenny, where small exchanges reveal both longing and misunderstanding. The pacing alternates between contemplative reflection and dramatic turns, particularly when the mirrors’ mysterious properties come into play. Vivid descriptions of gardens, rooms, and candlelit chambers create an atmospheric backdrop for the psychological drama at the story’s core. The novel invites reflection on how inner fantasies can both sustain and estrange us, and how the chance to see one’s life from another vantage point can awaken an unexpected desire for change.