The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong

 Plot: 8/10

Settings: 8/10

Characters: 9/10

Cover: 9/10

Overall: 8/10

“She sees dead people – and they see her.

Chloe Saunders used to have a pretty normal life. But that changed on the day she met her first ghost. Locked up in Lyle House, a group home for troubled teens, she finds out that there’s more to the home’s teen residents than meets the eye. Will Chloe be able to uncover the dangerous secrets of Lyle House… or will its skeletons come back to haunt her?

This thrilling first volume in the supernaturally charged Darkest Powers series by international bestselling author Kelley Armstrong will keep readers awake well into the darkest time of night.

The Summoning is the first book in the Darkest Powers series by Kelley Armstrong. At the moment, there are two other books in the series; The Awakening and The Reckoning.

Yes I know this book has been out for a while and so have been the others i reviewed. They are all books I have read some time before, i'am just updating! Sorry! 

The book follows Chloe Saunders, who is a normal high school girl, until she starts seeing ghosts. She is sent to Lyle House, a group home, where she has to try and get better before she is allowed to go back to school (she has been diagnosed with schizophrenia). However, the people in Lyle House are not all seemingly normal, and she spends most of the book trying to work out what is going on.

The characters in this book were pretty good. They mostly consisted of Chloe and the other kids from the house.
The main character, Chloe was a pretty typical protagonist. The book was told from her point of view. She was a pretty strong character, even though she was trying to deal with working out why she could see dead people. However, she didn’t seem overly worried about this; she seemed to be more concerned about when she’d be able to get out of Lyle House, and what the people back at home would think. I guess this is pretty typical for a teenage girl, but it was still a bit annoying at times.
Rachelle, or Rae became Chloe’s best friend in the house. She is in Lyle House because she has been diagnosed as a pyromaniac, and like Chloe, has to get better before she is allowed out. She is a bit more proactive than Chloe, and prompts her to start trying to work out why she and everyone else is in the house. I liked her, although she did seem to sometimes try a little too hard to fit in.
Simon and Derek, who are brothers, are also patients of Lyle House. They are quite mysterious throughout most of the book, and  although their purpose, etc. is revealed at the end, I thought that they acted in a way that was a bit at odds with their ultimate role in the book; I felt that they should have probably acted a bit more in character throughout the book, rather than just at the end.
Victoria, or Tori, another patient in the house, was the most obvious antagonist throughout the book. She was a complete (for a lack of a better word) bitch throughout the entire book to the rest of the characters. She purposely went at odds to them to stop them from working out what was going on in the house, and was just overall an annoying character.
The staff at the house were difficult to figure out. They seemed to honestly want to help the patients there but were also too pushy and tried to keep everyone cooped up inside, following extremely strict rules. In the end, when the whole story comes out, their true role is revealed, but I can’t really go into that without giving away the story.

The setting of the book was very small. Almost the entire book took place within Lyle House, and although it was a confined setting, it helped the characters to come together and find out what was going on. The smaller setting was also easier to keep track of, and forced the characters to look for answers in ways that were not too predictable.

The plotline was fairly interesting, however the bulk of the book was spent investigating the same things over and over again without the characters finding anything new; it had a tendency to get a little repetitive. Most of the main action happened at the end of the book, so it was a bit compressed, and could have been spread out over the whole book a bit, but the plot was still quite interesting.

The ghosts that Chloe sees are described in quite a lot of detail, which I personally could have done without, as some are quite gruesome, and the author doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Although it did help with explaining Chloe’s reaction to them, it could have been done in a little less detail.

The main premise of the story; the different supernatural creatures that inhabit the world in secret (quite similar to some other books, but anyway) wasn’t explored much in this book; the types and numbers inhabiting the world weren’t really explored, and the ones that were looked into were done only briefly; I think that a bit more of this could have been looked into to fill out the story a little more, but hopefully the author will give us a little more insight into this in later books.

Overall, The Summoning was quite a good introduction into a series that I hope will develop a little more in later books to make a great series. Although it had its flaws, it was interesting and well written.