Amazon Teeny Lil' Blog Category:  Young Adult/Teen Publisher: CreateSpace ISBN-10:  1451539584 Type: Fiction Pages: 256 Copyright: April 13, 2010 ISBN-13: 9781451539585 The Doctor said I should be dead. My heart beat furiously. I looked up at the flashes of lightning in the sky. Yes, I should be dead. Why wasn't I? C I N written by: Christina Leigh Pritchard Short Synopsis: Seventeen year old Lisa Brown’s life is falling apart. First, her mother and father divorce, then their house forecloses and now, her mother has decided to commit herself to a psychiatric hospital. If that weren’t enough, she must leave sunny south Florida to attend a boarding school full of geniuses in cold, Lynn, Massachusetts. The city where the locals taunt “Lynn, Lynn, city of sin; you never come out the way you went in.” And, they aren’t kidding. Lisa must live in a tiny shack with two strange teenagers, a dog named Pig who growls when you look at him and a cat named Rat. “Mind the cat,” everyone says. What the heck is wrong with this place? Lisa thinks she’s landed in her own house of horrors with the anti-social Alex and his facetious sister Ally. But, the real drama begins the day she is struck by lightning… Read the first 9 chapters HERE Excerpt Please see author's blog for the first 9 chapters FREE!

Ranko from Shelfari
"This is a really interesting science fiction/teenage romance type of novel. The main character is seventeen-year-old Lisa who has a highly dysfunctional mother who leaves Lisa with her Aunt Millie, who happens to be the dean of an elite boarding school.


Her aunt has a house near the school, and there's another house near there. In the second house two other students are staying, Alex and Ally. There's also a dog named Pig, and a cat named Rat, which gives the reader an idea that something rather strange is going to happen.

And it does. Both Alex and Ally seem to be cruel to Lisa. There's an odd rule about not touching either the dog or the cat, although the dog becomes instant friends with Lisa. There's strange weather, a lot of lightning, and the history of the school itself. Some of the story even involves events back in the 1600's, the Salem witch trails, and the rather intelligent explanation of the role of ergot in the hallucinations the girls had.


The most interesting thing, in my opinion, is trying to figure out what just what type of beings Alex and Ally are. One can run through a variety of possibilities, including shapeshifters, a sorcerer and a sorceress, vampires, maybe even some form of life from another planet. Part of the fun of the book is trying to figure out what they are and then comparing that to what they ultimately are shown to be.


The romance aspect is also done well, a lot along the Japanese style with the two main characters involved seeming to hate each other at first, reminding me of Ranma and Akane from Ranma ½.

It's a very enjoyable book."

Mark Cooper Author of Fledgling: Jason Steed
This is not my type of book. The cover gave me images of a period TV drama, but what I found was something lurking inside. A very powerful and original story.
Just when you think things can't possibly get any worse, they do. Christina Leigh Pritchard paints a picture with her words and pulls the reader into the story with a magnetism that makes the book pretty hard to put down.
Its a strong coming of age story, I recommend to teenagers and readers of young adult books. I believe this would be a winner on the 'Big Screen. The story of young love, pain and fear seem to be classic winners, this is a classic.

Apex Reviews-Chelsea Perry
Seventeen-year-old Lisa’s life is quickly coming apart in folds: after her mother and father divorce, their house is foreclosed on, and her mother checks herself into a psychiatric hospital, which forces Lisa to relocate to a boarding school in Massachusetts, where she’s housed in a tiny shack with two of the strangest teenagers ever to walk the face of the earth. To top it all off – as if things couldn’t get any worse – she soon learns that her problems are only just beginning when she’s suddenly struck by lightning...

Based on all the aforementioned facts, you’d think that CIN was just another depressing tale of melodramatic teen angst; instead, the debut installment in author Christina Pritchard’s intriguing new series takes quite a different approach to the typical challenges of contemporary young adulthood. In innovative fashion, Pritchard uses the effective combination of multi-dimensional characters and subtle subplots to expound on the universal theme of “adolescence-as-a-backdrop-to-learning-the-truth-about-one’s-real-self.” In Lisa, Pritchard has crafted quite the sympathetic protagonist, to which teens will easily relate: chronicling both her internal and external struggles with a genuine sense of the familiar, thereby inviting young readers to explore the depths of their own conflicted feelings. In so doing, they will find it easy to identify with the challenging – yet ultimately rewarding – journey she must take on the road to self-acceptance.

A tough, yet rewarding read, CIN is strongly recommended for teenagers seeking to make sense of a world where logic and reason often seem like foreign, unattainable concepts.”