Butterflies in Time
A flight goes awry and studious Beijing-native Kiki and her brash American-Chinese cousin Lucy find themselves thrown back into 18th Century China. Unmoored from their own time, the two young women struggle to find their places as maids chosen for service in the Forbidden City. Kiki keeps her head down and does her best to assimilate. After all, she’d read a dozen time travel romance novels about the Qing Dynasty and Emperor Kangxi’s enigmatic and charismatic sons who are all fighting for the throne. She knows that her only way forward is to marry one of them, obviously. To do that, she will need to be the perfect Chinese woman. Fiery Lucy, with her larger than life Texan bravado, however, attracts all the attention; the right and wrong kind, leaving Kiki feeling like a secondary character in her own story.
And what happens when ambassadors from the Eastern Roman Empire — supposed to be destroyed, but strangely flourishing in this alternative history — arrive in Beijing, with them the mysterious Spanish Merarch Diego Borgia who seems to know everything?
It seems the tiniest beat of a butterfly’s wings is capable of changing history.
Frances Leigh: A life in surreality 