Today @KirkusReviews...
...I wrote about Amber House, which has three authors:
Considering that background (and the number of authors), it isn’t all that surprising that the book’s first quarter suffers from a mild identity crisis. Our heroine, almost-16-year-old Sarah Parsons, starts her story off sounding more like a middle-aged woman than a teenage girl. To some degree, that can be explained by the brief Looking Back to Yesteryears prologue, but at some point, she seems to throw her middle-aged self by the wayside. Which is a relief, as her older self sounds so self-consciously Trying to Be Literary and Deep that she evokes V. C. Andrews—almost never a good thing.
Despite the rocky beginning, I ended up really enjoying it.
Oh, ALSO! Oddly enough, it turns out that I'm related (very distantly) to the authors. WEIRD.