The Awakening by Kelley Armstrong

 The Awakening by Kelley Armstrong

2009, HarperCollins

Series: Book 2 of Darkest Powers

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Rating

Synopsis: My name is Chloe Saunders, and if you had met me a few weeks ago, you probably would have described me as an average teenage girl - someone normal.

Now my life has changed forever and I'm as far away from normal as it gets. A living science experiment - not only can I see ghosts, but I was genetically altered by a sinister organization called the Edison Group. What does that mean? For starters, I'm a teenage necromancer whose powers are out of control: I raise the dead without even trying. Trust me, that is not a power you want to have. Ever.

Now I'm running for my life with three of my supernatural friends - a charming sorcerer, a cynical werewolf, and a disgruntled witch - and we have to find someone who can help us before the Edison Group finds us first. Or die trying.

The Good: Kelley Armstrong is a strong writer and it consistently shows in her books. Her characters are engaging, her word choice on point, always. There were a few surprising twists, enough to make the book worth the read if you enjoyed the first in the trilogy.

The Bad: There was a significant falloff of personal enjoyment reading this one from the first in the trilogy. It clearly suffers from middle of a trilogy syndrome. It's hopelessly cliched, completely predictable with the main character "on the run" in an attempt to discover the truth of her situation. We've left the carefully constructed setting setup in the first novel and are now running blind in the world not knowing who to trust. I could be describing almost any random middle of a trilogy book here and that's a huge problem for this book and YA trilogies on the whole.