Publishers Weekly starred review After the death of their estranged grandmother, sixteen-year-old Sarah Parsons and her little brother accompany their mother on her return to the old family estate, Amber House, to settle finances and prepare to sell the house. The result is something rich, strange, and utterly fascinating. Lush descriptions and an intricate plot drive this intense tale, which straddles the lines between magical realism, fantasy, ghost stories, and horror, with a touch of romance and classic glamour. As she and her new friend Jackson, the grandson of a longtime family friend, search for a treasure supposedly hidden in Amber House, they're drawn into a mystery that spans generations, and only Sarah has the ability to fix things before tragedy strikes again. There, Sarah is beset by visions of the past, quickly learning that the house is almost alive, filled with ghosts and memories. After the death of 15-year-old Sarah's grandmother, Sarah and her family move into Amber House, a sprawling, centuries-old Maryland mansion that has been in the family ever since it was built. The ghosts of the past haunt the present in this complex tale of family secrets and lingering loss, first in a planned trilogy from Moore and her daughters. Read moreĬommended for Oregon Book Awards (Young Adult) 2014 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. She grows closer to both Jackson and a young man named Richard Hathaway, whose family histories are each deeply entwined with her own. 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. After her grandmother passes away, Sarah and her friend Jackson decide to search for the diamonds-and the house comes alive. , nor hunted for lost diamonds in its walls. She's never walked its hedge maze nor found its secret chambers she's never glimpsed the shades that haunt it. Sarah Parsons has never seen Amber House, the grand Maryland estate that's been in her family for three centuries. I was sixteen the first time my grandmother died.

Amber house by kelly moore