A decent children's fantasy tale, aimed I would say more at actual children rather than teenagers. The writing and characterisation are decent, and I'm interested in the characters, particularly in Phoebe and her relation to the others. That being said, it's a bit more simplistic than I'd realised and I suspect I may not bother to read the rest of them.

What we have here is essentially the children's introduction to an interesting historical house (presumably the key location for the rest of the series), meeting their adult mentor figures for the series, discovery of their role in a magical adventure they don't actually understand yet, and what you might call a test-run adventure that introduces the sorts of things they might be doing. Fairly standard fare, competently done.

I would say that this felt very much like one book in a quartet, rather than one book in a four-part series. While there were some events, it felt mostly like setup for the later books, rather than an arc of its own that was closed. As such, it was a bit unsatisfying to read in isolation. It feels unfair to penalise it for that, so I won't, but it's worth noting that some authors manage to avoid this and make each book a full story. Again, though, it's a children's book and thus both relatively short and relatively simple.

It was decent, I don't regret reading it, I wouldn't refuse to read another one, nor do I plan to look for them, so it gets a 3.

One odd thing: at one point a character says "poop". This really threw me out, because I've never heard a Brit use this word and can only view it as an Americanism, so the sense of Britishness wobbled violently. No idea why it ended up in this story... ( )