Finished Amber House by Kelly Moore, Tucker Reed and Larkin Reed. I received a copy from the publisher.
Summary (from Goodreads):
“`I was sixteen the first time my grandmother died . . .’
Sarah Parsons has never seen Amber House, the grand Maryland estate that’s been in her family for three centuries. She’s never walked its hedge maze nor found its secret chambers; she’s never glimpsed the shades that haunt it, nor hunted for lost diamonds in its walls.
But all of that is about to change. After her grandmother passes away, Sarah and her friend Jackson decide to search for the diamonds–and the house comes alive. She discovers that she can see visions of the house’s past, like the eighteenth-century sea captain who hid the jewels, or the glamorous great-grandmother driven mad by grief. She grows closer to both Jackson and a young man named Richard Hathaway, whose family histories are each deeply entwined with her own. But when the visions start to threaten the person she holds most dear, Sarah must do everything she can to get to the bottom of the house’s secrets, and stop the course of history before it is cemented forever.”
This is an interesting book. It’s set in Maryland and is sort of a haunted house story. I say “sort of” because the house doesn’t have ghosts, per se, but it does have echoes. Those who are sensitive to it can see or hear fragments of the house’s history.
I liked Sarah and her younger brother Sammy immediately. Their mom is kind of awful, but the book eventually explains how that came to be.
The last few pages completely changed everything and honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m going to have to read the second book to see where the series goes from there. (And I hate that I can’t be more specific because it would be the most severe spoiler ever.)
I hope the next book also discusses the house’s past more. There are some incredibly creepy scenes and I would like to know more about how and why those scenes happened.
Even though I didn’t 100% love the book, I definitely liked it enough to keep going with the series.
