The Gathering

Title: The Gathering
Author: Kelley Armstrong
Year Published: 2011

Synopsis: Maya lives in a small medical-research town on Vancouver Island. How small? You can’t find it on the map. It has less than two-hundred people, and her school has only sixty-eight students—for every grade from kindergarten to twelve.

Now, strange things are happening in this claustrophobic town, and Maya's determined to get to the bottom of them. First, the captain of the swim team drowns mysteriously in the middle of a calm lake. A year later, mountain lions start appearing around Maya's home, and they won’t go away. Her best friend, Daniel, starts getting negative vibes from certain people and things. It doesn't help that the new bad boy in town, Rafe, has a dangerous secret—and he's interested in one special part of Maya's anatomy: Her paw-print birthmark.

Why?: I won the sequel, The Calling, in a HarperTeen tweetstakes. So, naturally, I bought this book so I could understand what was going on in the book I won.

Expectations: I expect an interesting story revolving around Maya's birthmark. Does it mean anything? Or is she just a normal girl with a weird shaped birthmark? Maybe she can speak to big cats since the mountain lions keep showing up.

Judging a book by its cover: The cover has just a girl on the cover. It's mostly blue, and I think that adds a bit of mystery to it. If I saw this in a bookstore, I would probably pick it up.


--Ashley