Its always darkest before the dawn!

TITLE:  Dark Before Dawn
AUTHOR:  Stacy Juba
PRINT LENGTH:  213 pages
MY RATING:  aaaaa
PUBLISHED: September 24, 2011
LANGUAGE: English
RATING:  Tween/ Young Adult
GENRE:  Paranormal
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon 

SUMMARY: Psychic chills and thrills in a deserted Maine beach town from the author of Twenty-Five Years Ago Today, Sink or Swim, and Face-Off. When teen psychic Dawn Christian gets involved with a fortune teller mentor and two girls who share her mysterious talents, she finally belongs after years of being a misfit. When she learns her new friends may be tied to freak "accidents" in town, Dawn has an important choice to make - continue developing the talent that makes her special or challenge the only people who have ever accepted her.

REVIEW: Stacy Juba has created a fabulous story for kids and adults. We begin this story with Dawn a young girl with psychic abilities that her mother wants her to hide. She has a premonition that something horrible is going to happen on her first day of school. And boy was she right!

What happens next is the stuff of nightmares. I can’t go into too many details because it would give away the story. But I will say that Juba has created a character family that is so wonderful in all its crazy familial intricacies. The fear Dawn’s mother feels at each and every new psychic awakening. The struggles of a young girl in a new family with a new step-father and step-brother and going to a new high school are all so very believable. The “mis-fits” who Dawn finds and fits in with and the mysterious psychic who is willing to teach children to awaken their inborn talents make this mystery a true page turner.

The twists and turns that this story takes were relatively straight forward and whether it’s my instinctual abilities to deduce what’s going to happen next or a psychic ability I just knew all was not as it seemed. And so I knew something would happen with the psychic but even I never truly expected who she was and why things were happening.

Stacy Juba really needs to continue on with this saga because I feel that there is so much more to be done with Dawn. But it is a strongly written piece and I do recommend this book to children aged 10 and up. I really believe that young and old alike will love this tale and as a woman whose own children are different I can say that this is a wonderful story of how children treat their peers and a good lesson on how to treat those that are different than you. And while it wasn’t written to be a lesson on acceptance of others it is indeed a story about accepting who you are regardless of your differences. So please do go out and grab a copy of this book because it is well worth the read and will keep you flipping those pages to find out what happens next.

Details/Disclaimer: Review copy was provided to me in exchange for a fair and honest review. The free book held no determination on my personal review.