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Goodreads Summary: 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’ll confess. I honestly didn’t expect to like these books. I was at the library and didn’t want to bring only one book home and didn’t have much time to look. So I just grabbed The Summoning and The Awakening thinking I’d probably at least be able to get through the first at some point. I ended up reading them in a day each. I loved these books.
Chloe was a strong, interesting narrator who kept exceeding my expectations. She was really shy and sweet in the beginning. She could definitely be considered too nice. I’d assumed she would just slide along through the whole book letting everyone else do the hard work. (Unfortunately, I’ve found that many female MC’s in young adult books have an annoying lack of backbone and let their men take care of them. This is NOT the type of protagonist I enjoy reading about.) However, I found Chloe surprisingly resourceful. She was obviously scared when she started seeing ghosts and even more scared every time she learned something new about Lyle house and being a necromancer. But she never let it stop her from learning more and fighting back and I loved that about her.
I loved Derek almost instantly. He’s moody and quiet and a little bit of an asshole. But he’s also loyal, funny, and almost annoyingly protective of the people he cares about i.e. his brother, Simon, and eventually Chloe. Not long after I decided I loved him I also decided he and Chloe need to love each other for forever. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen during this book, though they’re pretty good friends now so I’ve decided to be hopeful.
There were quite a few secondary characters and I’m fairly undecided about most of them. Simon is funny and I’d like him better if I wasn’t worried he’d get in the way of Chloe and Derek loving each other. I really like Liz (a ghost) and can’t wait to see more of her. Rae was nice but a little on the annoying side. She never seemed to take anything seriously. I hated Tori. She was a spoiled little bitch. I get her mother is an even bigger bitch but that’s no excuse for the things she does.
I really liked the way Armstrong portrays the different supernatural races and the politics behind them. It made it different from the many other YA paranormal books. I also really loved that Chloe is a necromancer. It’s something that I haven’t seen a lot of in books and it made it really unique.
The ending of this book drove me nuts. Everything goes to shit… then it ends… I’m just happy I don’t have to wait for any of these books to be published because I can’t wait to finish them.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes young adult, paranormal fantasy, and romance. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts. Amanda hasn’t read these books yet so I have no one to talk to about them. If you’ve read them, I would love to know what you think of them.
-Antonia

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