The Summoning

The Summoning (Darkest Powers, book 1), by Kelley Armstrong:

"My name is Chloe Sanders 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 the day that I saw my first ghost - and the ghost saw me.
Now there are ghosts everywhere and they won't leave me along. 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?"

While I enjoyed parts of this book (the opening is particularly creepy) I was eventually disappointed by it. Part of the problem is that not only is it the first in a series, but it ends on a cliffhanger - not something I usually enjoy. That means that there are a lot of unresolved questions, and character motivations are still somewhat mysterious, which means less investment in them. I really like Armstrong's adult fantasy books, which is why I picked this one up, but the characters here don't have the same "zing" factor that her adult protagonists do. This is pretty much just 400 pages of set-up and there isn't enough resolution or action (although the action does kick up in the last couple of chapters) to make me anxious for the next book.