The House of Months and Years by Emma Trevayne is a middle grade novel with a Gothic or horror feel. When her distant aunt and uncle die, Amelia Howling is forced to move into their home when they leave her parents in charge of their children. Her parents assure her that it will be like having a grand adventure with three new siblings, but Amelia is not convinced. Luckily, the house is large, filled with nooks and crannies perfect for hiding from her cousins. But even with all the nooks and crannies, the rumbling and crumbling rooms are more sinister than they seem. The house was built years ago by a creature named Horatio, and he’s been waiting for the perfect human inhabitant: Amelia. Horatio has the power to travel through time and memories, and lures Amelia into his world. The memories of children, he told her, were the best, and Amelia agreed—her cousins were full of good memories. Until she noticed that once she and Horatio visited a memory, it was gone forever. And she had been stealing the good memories of her cousins and their parents without even noticing! Horrified and scared, Amelia lets her cousins in on her secret, and asks them for help. Together, they must race through time to recover their minds and break the perfect clockwork of the evil Calendar House.

The House of Months and Years is an eerie adventure with a Gothic atmosphere that comes alive. The writing style is lyrical, with significant metaphors and descriptions that paint the picture of the moods of the characters and the atmosphere of the house. I liked Amelia’s character, who has to make some big changes and knows that what she is feeling towards her now larger family is not fair to them, but cannot change those feelings. The concept of the Boogeyman stealing good memories and the steps Amelia and her cousins had to take together make for a compelling story. I could find no fault with the story, but I never really felt enthralled by the story even though it was exactly what I normally like. Good characters, a creepy atmosphere and big bad, and coming to terms with relationships and life were all there. I think the volume of descriptive text was what

The House of Months and Years had all the things that usually make me love a book, but for some reason I just never got completely drawn in. The story had suspense, character development, and some good creepy moments. I am not sure why the book and I never connected, but I think it will be a favorite for many readers.

First of all, the writing in this book is generally great. It's fairly sophisticated for a MG novel, assuming high intelligence and literacy in potential younger readers. The same high intelligence and literacy, perhaps, as that of the main character, Amelia -- a bookish 10 year old girl deeply upset over moving house. She's used to being an only child, and now has to share her parents' attention with her 3 cousins following their parents' death. It's refreshing that the main character isn't one of the orphans, and Amelia is nearly as vulnerable in her own way. Amelia's behavior is selfish and self-centered to the extreme, but hey -- she's 10 years old, and her responses seem somewhat realistic.

Enter Horatio, the mysterious shadow-man who "is" Amelia's new house. He's not a ghost, but another kind of entity who takes Amelia under his wing and offers her an appealing escape: a peculiar kind of Time Travel! bound up in the powers of the house. Adult readers will probably pick up a lot earlier on the dark, sinister, and manipulative undertones in Horatio's interactions with Amelia but younger readers are likely to be kept guessing a little longer.

The best parts of this book are Amelia's "real life": arguing with her cousins, missing her old house and best friend. Her explorations of her strange new house are interesting, if a little lacking in atmosphere. The bits where she "travels" with Horatio to Medieval times or on a pirate ship, to name two examples, are actually kind of boring! Say what?! One would think there should be some excitement there to justify the appeal to Amelia of Horatio's offer over real life. But no, those bits are the most generic and vapid. The weirdly creepy dinner parties that the group of time-traveling shadow-people hold (Horatio is not the only one of his kind) are also a little underdone. Again, one would expect more of these scenes, to justify the appeal to Amelia of spending eternity with these folks in lieu of regular humans.

I enjoyed the first 2/3 of this book a lot more than the final 1/3, and the ending ultimately felt quite rushed, before being capped off with a cheap and unnecessary epilogue that sets up for a potential sequel that would actually undermine the messages in this standalone book. I'd be very happy to share this book with younger readers, but not other adults. In any case, I'd probably recommend skipping the epilogue entirely.

Emma Trevayne has written a vibrantly detailed and descriptive novel where metaphors are used like brushstrokes on a painting. Her writing is captivating while evoking the emotional gamut from joy to sadness from the reader. She requires you to use creative thinking skills so you can become a part of the story as her wording has this edge of realism to it that your imagination can’t quite grasp what you’re reading isn’t fantasy. It’s magically inspired and amusingly educational thanks to the main character’s love of the dictionary with its sporadic multi-syllable words scattered about. Trevayne obviously did a bit of research as she enriched her fantasy with stories from various places around the world for Amelia to visit on her adventures. It's definitely the most unique plot line I've read in quite a while.

The overarching themes of family and grief were beautifully handled through her complex, well-written characters. As a parent there were times I wanted to hug Amelia and times I wanted to ground her for her attitude and treatment towards her cousins who were suffering from something far worse than her which she realized eventually. I loved how she made the house its own character with a colorful personality. The book starts off making it seem as if the house is a living entity, not in that Amityville kind of way, but as something more poetic.

This was a surprisingly powerful, artistic and charming story for being a children’s book. Adults should definitely enjoy this as well and the lessons gleaned from within its lyrical pages can certainly liven up conversation around the dinner table.