Awakening

The book opens with a woman named Stephanie having a baby. The woman is a psychic and apparently does not want her soon-to-be-born daughter to know anything about her past.

The story then moves to seventeen years later and Calla, the daughter, at her mother's funeral. Her father is going to California, and Calla is going to spend a few weeks with her grandmother.

Calla's mother and grandmother had a very bitter falling out years ago. The grandmother stays at Lilydale, a center for the practice of Spiritualism and other psychic matters.

When she gets to her grandmother's place, a variety of strange things happen, including her detecting a certain fragrance, a music box playing that wasn't round, and Calla seeing someone in the mirror of a jewelry box but finding no one actually there.

Later, Calla looks at the front of her grandmother's house and finds out she is a medium. She's thrown into a confrontation between her grandmother's world of spirits, mediums, talking to the dead and ghosts in the house and the world of her mother, which was a very tidy, orderly, no-nonsense world with no room for mediums, ghosts or psychics.

What makes it rougher on Calla is that she is seeing ghosts herself.

There's the problem of the girl with a mother who doesn't seem to see her; a strange woman that keeps appearing and disappearing; a mystery about a nearby lake and what it has to do with her mother and grandmother; two possible boyfriends, and the growing possibility that her mother did not die of an accident, but was murdered.

It's a really, really good book, starting off a little slow, but building throughout. The story will be continued in another book, Believing. This is definitely a book worth reading.

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