This is a work full of imagination. Through a mirror, we arrive at a world that seems absurd yet is deeply real. The author relies entirely on innocent, unrestrained fantasy to present a world full of childlike wonder and dreamlike enchantment that belongs only to children. The work is both magical and deeply rooted in everyday life, with a strong sense of the present.

— Cao Wenxuan, winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award

★ With a foreword by Cao Wenxuan, winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award!
★ A major novel by Yang Cui, a post-90s writer. This book has won the First Cao Wenxuan "Bronze Sunflower" Children's Literature Award and the Bingxin Literature Award.
★ A fantasy novel with profound humanistic care, expressing the themes of "growth" and "compassion," with strong contemporary relevance and a sense of the times—like riding a time machine on a wondrous journey through time and space with the author.
★ "Your future, my past—we will always meet." The first encounter and reunion across time and space have been praised by readers as "an O. Henry-style ending, unexpected yet perfectly logical."

A mirror becomes the bridge connecting the real world and a fantastical one. On her tenth birthday, a girl named Qiyue is led by a group of cats into another world. Passing through a strange mirror, she arrives in a completely unfamiliar, bizarre realm. Here there are peculiar spirits, the gentle and refined Mr. Zhuang, the sharp and capable twin sisters Yin and Tong, a sharp-tongued and evil witch, and a large group of cats with distinct personalities… In this strange world, Qiyue experiences all sorts of odd, amusing, heartwarming, and adventurous events. When she must finally leave, she is filled with longing for everything she has encountered…

The core suspense of the story revolves around Qiyue and a boy named Manmu. The two meet several times at different temporal nodes across the two worlds—"the past here is the future there, and the past there is the future here"—until the final revelation: between Qiyue and Manmu lie countless first encounters and reunions that span time and space.

Yang Cui
From Guang'an, Sichuan, she graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Wuhan University. She is the author of China's first "Eastern Cultural Fantasy" young adult series, Monster Inn. She has won the First Cao Wenxuan "Bronze Sunflower" Children's Literature Award, the Bingxin Literature Award, and the "Big Blue Whale World Cup" Children's Literature Award. With her profound foundation in traditional culture and extraordinary imagination, she has received consistent praise from renowned writers such as Cao Wenxuan, Bi Feiyu, and Liu Xuyuan.
Her representative works include The Cat in the Mirror and the Monster Inn series.