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Reviewed by:
  • The Summoning
  • Deborah Stevenson
Armstrong, Kelley; The Summoning. HarperCollins, 2008; 390p (Darkest Powers) Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-166272-0 $18.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-166269-0 $17.99 Ad Gr. 7–10

Chloe Saunders sees dead people, and it freaks her out something rotten. Her responses freak out her father, her aunt, and the school authorities even more, leaving Chloe diagnosed as schizophrenic and placed into Lyle House, a private institution for troubled teens. There she struggles to be the model patient in order [End Page 63] to obtain release, but she’s hampered by the powerful voices of the ghosts within the house. As she gets to know her fellow house residents, Chloe begins to realize that they’re all supernaturally gifted, that she herself is a necromancer with the power to communicate with and raise the dead, and that the adults at the facility—and her own aunt—are knowingly keeping the gifted teens under check for their own sinister purposes. The opening half, wherein Chloe encounters various ghosts and fights her growing desire to answer the voices coming from the basement of Lyle House, is splendidly haunting, with hair-raising suspense, disturbing effects, and a running undercurrent of unease. When the book shifts into its series setup, though, it changes gears into overexplanation and supernatural overkill, with the residents conveniently representing various flavors of paranormal capabilities and the ghostly energies draining away in the face of the adult conspiracy and pursuit. As a result, this is essentially two different books, and while the first is more successful here, the latter is creating the foundation for what is likely to be a readable adventure once it hits its stride in the second volume; supernatural-story fans may therefore wish to get in on the ground floor here.

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