Rowena’s review of The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong.

My name is Chloe Saunders and my life will never be the same again.

All I wanted was to make friends, meet boys, and keep on being ordinary. I don’t even know what that means anymore. It all started on the day that I saw my first ghost—and the ghost saw me.

Now there are ghosts everywhere and they won’t leave me alone. To top it all off, I somehow got myself locked up in Lyle House, a “special home” for troubled teens. Yet the home isn’t what it seems. Don’t tell anyone, but I think there might be more to my housemates than meets the eye. The question is, whose side are they on? It’s up to me to figure out the dangerous secrets behind Lyle House . . . before its skeletons come back to haunt me.

I’ve seen this book around the YA blog circuit and I’ve heard a lot of good things about this series so I was curious about it. I picked this book up and dug right in. It was an interesting read and I was very much drawn into the story of Chloe Saunders and her pack of friends from Lyle House. The day that Chloe finally gets her period (she was already 15 and had just barely got it) and on the very same day, she sees her first ghost. Chloe thinks she’s growing crazy and because she freaked out at school, she was sent home and then she was sent to Lyle House where her Aunt Lauren and her father was sure she’d get better.

Chloe meets other kids that are at Lyle House, her roommate Liz, a friendly type Rae, a cutie named Simon and his foster brother, Derek and then there’s Queen Bitch, Tori. Chloe’s under the impression that she’s sick, the doctors that run the Lyle House tell her that she’s schizophrenic and the more she fights against her condition, the more she starts to believe the doctors she’s been seeing. But a friendship that starts up between Simon, Derek and Chloe reveal Chloe’s true nature to her.

She’s a necromancer. She can make the dead rise and she sees ghosts and can summon them. When Chloe finds all of this out from Derek, it takes her a while to come to terms with it but Simon needs someone to help him look for his missing Dad, Chloe steps up to the challenge and they’re thrown into an adventure that made for one very interesting read.

I thought this was a great introduction to the Young Adult side of Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld series. Chloe came off as a normal teen who was living a not so normal life. She wasn’t perfect and she wasn’t always right but she felt real and I appreciated the efforts that Armstrong put forth to form this story. Chloe and her band of friends in this story were great additions to a pretty decent storyline that had me wanting more. I’m pretty anxious to read the next book. I’m so anxious that I’ve already used the ‘Browse Inside’ feature over at Harper Teen. They’ve got the first 10 chapters posted over there and it’s definitely whetted my appetite and I’m definitely going to be running to the store asap to get the next book in this series.

I’d definitely recommend this book to teens and others who enjoy a good paranormal tale with interesting characters and an engaging storyline. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the characters in this story were charming but they were interesting. I’m very interested in continuing this series so that’s got to say something for how good Armstrong’s writing was in this book. I’ll probably start the next book over the weekend so would I recommend this book? Definitely.

Grade: 4.25 out of 5

This book is available from Harper Teen. You can buy it here or here in e-format.