Celia's House by D.E. Stevenson

This is a charming novel. I don't quite know how to describe it, but the best I can do is to say that it's alive.

It’s not a novel for those seeking high-strung adventure and things of that sort. Don't get me wrong, it is NOT dull and boring. In fact, I could scarcely put it down!

Celia's House is about the Dunne Family. They live in the Scottish country in the early 1900's. Old Aunt Celia wants her house to go to her grand-nephew, Humphrey, when she is gone. (It is quite funny, actually, because no one else really knows this, everyone else assumes that it is going to her nephew.) In order for Humphrey to get Dunnian, he has to leave the estate to his daughter, Celia; and not to his eldest son Mark. There is a slight problem... there is no Celia.

Old Aunt Celia knew this, and she was not crazy, either. Humphrey agreed to her terms, knowing his wife, and three children would live it at Dunnian, eventually. He felt sure that Alice could produce this Celia. In fact, by the end of 1910, they have a total of five children, and an extra.

Deb is that extra. She was Old Aunt Celia's sister's daughter (if that makes any sense), and when Deb's mother gets re-married she leaves Deb to live with Alice and Humphrey.

It was so exciting to watch Mark grow up. To see him about seven years old when he was first living at Dunnian, and then later when he was in his twenties putting on an amateur play of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and then when he gets married... it was bitter-sweet seeing is grow up right before my eyes. Going though all kinds of troubles, and then remember the young child he had once been, telling Johnson that his Mummy would pay for the apple, or thinking that the old woman on the stairs had been a Miss Terry...

the lines of this Novel flowed, the are filled with excitement, longing, sorrow, and hints of comedy. I don't know how I went so long without reading it!