The Awakening

Armstrong, Kelley. 2009. The Awakening. HarperCollins. 357 pages.

When the door to my cell clicked open, the first thought that flitted through my doped-up brain was that Liz had changed her mind and come back. But ghosts don't open doors. They will, on occasion, ask me to open one, so I can raise and interrogate the zombies of supernaturals killed by a mad scientist, but they never need one opened for themselves.

Will they or won't they...escape successfully...that is the question driving this book. Will our ghost-seeing heroine, Chloe, escape from the evil powers-that-be? Will her friends escape too? Will she ever feel "safe" again?

This is the second in a series. It is sequel to The Summoning a book that I enjoyed for the most part. It ended oh-so-dramatically with a "shock" of an ending. So it was a book begging for a sequel, and yet, for some odd reason I can't help wondering if I wouldn't have been happier off without picking the story back up. I didn't feel that way (obviously) before I picked this one up. I wanted to like this second one just as much as I liked the first. And yet, it just didn't capture my attention the way the first one did. Perhaps there wasn't enough tension and suspense? Or perhaps I just didn't care as much as I thought I did? I don't know for sure.

For a book containing a whole lot of chase scenes, I found it lacking in intensity. What I enjoyed most about the first one just wasn't there in this second one. It's not that nothing happened. It's just that I felt that I was waiting for something big to happen. And it really never did. Perhaps the difference between the two was this one focused more on character building and exploring the dynamics of the relationships between the characters. Mainly between Chloe and the two guys in her life, Simon and Derek.

© Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews