The Awakening

I'm starting to feel a little bad for spending a week of blogging doing little but ragging on Kelley Armstrong.  I think she's a good author and her two paranormal series are significantly better than most other works in the adult and young adult paranormal romance/fantasy/whatever subgenres.  That makes it all the more disappointing when her books are anything other than great.  And while The Awakening (HarperCollins 2009, no editor listed), second in the YA "Darkest Powers" trilogy that started with The Summoning (discussed here), is a pretty good book and, unlike the first, does not end on an infuriating cliffhanger, I'm still having some problems with the trilogy so far.

Warning: spoilers below for the first book.

For many years, I had one of those hideous recurring nightmares which I called the running dream.  In it, I'd be chased by something horrific and would go through a repeating loop of run-run-run, arrive somewhere safe, then find out it isn't safe and have to run again, over and over again until I'd wake up gasping in terror.  The details varied from the relatively mundane (wolves in a forest, serial killer in my neighborhood) to the only-in-dreams (blue cyclops chasing me through a terraced blue garden full of neatly trimmed blue boxwood hedges), but the pattern was the same, and I learned that if I woke up from it I couldn't even go back to sleep because I'd end up right back in the same running scenario.  I finally managed to beat the dream, though the solution was almost worse than the problem, and I don't have it often anymore.

Why is this relevant?  This series is starting to remind me of this dream.  Chloe Saunders and her fellow supernatural teen friends flee and reach somewhere fairly safe.  Then it turns out to not be so safe.  So they flee again and reach somewhere that feels safe.  Except that it isn't.  Lather, rinse, repeat with some variance in the details.  This is compounded by the opening of the book: Chloe and co. are locked up by the evil doctors and have to escape.  This is remarkably similar to the last section of the first book, in which Chloe and co. are locked up by the evil doctors and have to escape.  And since Chloe's supernatural talent is for necromancy (summoning ghosts and raising the dead), we also have a horrific bit from the first book in which she raises some rotting corpses repeated several times in the second book.

I can't help thinking that there's really only one book here, not two.

Now, I don't want to suggest that it's all bad.  Armstrong has a gift for creating compelling characters and nasty situations to put them in.  And the necromancy parts really are horrific: sentient ghosts forced back into their rotting corpses and coming for Chloe.  I really do want to know how Chloe and some of her friends, particularly the werewolf Derek, deal with their powers and get their lives together.  I want to know what happened to Chloe's aunt and Derek's foster-father.  I want to know about the experiments performed on the teens and how that will affect their powers in the future.  I want to know about the jeweled pendant shown on the book covers and why it's changing color.  And, of course, I'll be happy to see the evil doctors get their comeuppance.  I burned through the book at an amazing pace hoping the plot would get past the running/safe/running/safe loop and get to the story I want to see.  But it didn't, and it feels to me like there's an awful lot left to cram into the third book if it's to deliver satisfaction with the trilogy as a whole.

One advantage of all the wheel-spinning is that it does give Armstrong time to work in a lot of info-dump from the relatively well-informed Derek and his foster-brother Simon (a budding sorcerer) to the entirely ignorant Chloe.  It's smoothly done and well-integrated into the overall plot, and she's thought out how the kids' non-standard powers relate to the rules of her universe as a whole.  There's even a bit in this book that shouts-out to the adult series ("Women of the Otherworld"), with a couple of characters referred to in the upcoming Frostbitten (in the first few chapters, which are posted online here; look at the menu on the left) making a cameo appearance and a reference to the werewolf Pack which includes the main characters in four previous books, most recently Men of the Otherworld.  That's a nice gift for those of us following the universe as a whole.

Armstrong is also fabulous with the online extras.  There's a series website (separate from Armstrong's main site) as well as a LiveJournal for Chloe which includes a free novella.  This really is a good way for an author, especially one who writes in series format, to build a fanbase.  Armstrong's freebies have kept me checking her website on a regular basis for several years now and tracking down anthologies I wouldn't otherwise touch (Dates From Hell; paranormal chick lit, gack) to get her short fiction.

Overall, despite the problems, I still recommend this book, and with it out I can recommend the first as well, since the cliffhanger ending is less of an issue.  I'm looking forward, with some reservations, to the third.

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Comments

[Serge]

Chloe Saunders and her fellow supernatural teen friends flee and reach somewhere fairly safe. Then it turns out to not be so safe. So they flee again and reach somewhere that feels safe. Except that it isn't.

That sounds like the plot of most slasher movies I've had the misfortune of running into or that I read about.

I hope you don't get those dreams anymore. As for myself, I've seldom had anything this bad. They usually are variations of the old school dream, except that the setting is my job, and I'm unable to solve a problem. I did once have a neat SF dream, appropriately set in San Francisco, about what if the Sixties had not been followed by a takeover of Society by conservative forces. The one detail I remember is that the island of Yerba Buena, which is part of the Bay Bridge, was the site of the Temple of Good Grass. Yes, the origin of that one is easy to figure out as Yerba Buena means Good Grass.

[Susan de Guardiola]

I tend to dream spectacularly and can remember them briefly when I wake up, but I don't have as many nightmares as I did as a kid and don't have the running dream nearly as often. Though I did have it once back in the summer, where I was running through my mysteriously-expanded house, which grew an entire new wing full of secret stairways and interesting crannies plus a gigantic multi-room attic for me to run in. I was quite sorry when I woke up and realized my house wasn't nearly as exciting as I'd believed in dreamland.

[Serge]

I dunno, Susan. Your house has had the ceiling fall because of that plumbing problem. And you had a bat infestation in 2006.

("That's not the kind of excitement I meant, Serge.")

[Serge]

Susan... Do you ever have what I think are called lucid dreams? Mine tend to be of that nature, but that usually limits itself to my realizing this isn't real while still in the dream. That can be quite handy when the oneiric trip is unpleasant. That being said, it's my understanding that some people can then control the plot of their dream. I wish I could do that.

[Marilee J. Layman]

I can do that -- change the dream to something less scary, and I can wake myself up.

[Serge]

"Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber, that there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality is being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time -- only we don't know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that's true, I guess we're lucky not knowing it. This is confusing enough."

- from The Lathe of Heaven