High Maintenance Mom

After finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass), I was looking for another fun young adult novel to read. Lily Dale: Awakening, filled the void with the story of Calla, a typical teen whose world is turned upside down when her mother dies and she takes off to spend the summer in Lily Dale with her psychic grandmother...

The story opens with a funeral where Calla has to navigate her feelings about her family in front of an ex-boyfriend. To make her life more difficult, she also learns she won't be spending the summer with her father or her friends. Instead, she agrees to spend the summer with a grandmother she hasn't really seen in over twelve years. After leaving the comforts of home, she moves to the small town of Lily Dale where she begins to learn about the world of psychics and to question whether she has also inherited special abilities.

I love how Calla's grandmother is a free spirit who lets her discover who she is on her own. We find Calla to be a strong teen dealing with big issues in her life: the death of her mother, a move before her senior year of high school, missing a previous boyfriend, meeting new friends, discovering secrets from her mother's past, and dating. At the end of the book, I was ready to keep reading about Calla and I look forward to the continuing story.

Lily Dale: Awakening is written for ages 12 and up (7th grade and up). Wendy Corsi Staub is a New York Times bestselling author of suspense novels and has published over 60 books for adults and teenagers.