Soon the FBI kick in and take her to a base and try to have her use her powers on missing convicts in the area that are said to have escaped jail, but are dead. Jessica keeps waking up knowing where a missing child is and is all over the news. She is then to discover that she is psychic. Jessica calls an agency known as 1-800-Where-R-U. Soon she wakes up the next morning knowing where a missing child is. Jessica Mastriani gets struck by lightning when she hides under metal bleachers during a thunder storm. Jess saves a bunch of kids, agrees to go with the FBI 'to be studied' mostly because the reporters on her lawn were making her brother Dougie come close to 'episoding,' gets broken out by Rob and a bunch of others, and lies and says her powers are gone. Yeah, I have to admit, watching them resist and kiss and resist again was a big part of the attraction for me. He's 18 to Jess' 16, he's on probation, though for what he won't ever say, and despite their obvious (and occasionally admitted attraction) he won't touch Jess because she's jailbait. She treats him like her brother, like her sometimes expasperating, sometimes strange, brother, and not like a mental illness.Īnd, lest I forget, there's Rob Wilkins, the handsome motorcycle-riding guy from the wrong side of the tracks that Jess meets in one of her many detention sessions. Jess loves them all, but the way she is with Doug is marvelous. There's also her family, the mother who sews them matching gingham dresses, her father who owns three restaurants and still finds time to be an awesome father, her brother Mikey the computer genius who spies on his sunbathing neighbor, and her older brother Dougie who tried to commit suicide and hears voices when he forgets to take his medication.

This sticks with her, it guides everything she does from her on out. He was really afraid of the abusive father that his mother kidnapped him from and when she reported his location she nearly messed things up for him and his mother in a big way.

She assumed he was afraid of his kidnappers. One of the most important moments was when Jess went out to check on the location of a missing boy that she'd dreamed and was told by that boy to go away and leave him alone. I'm not sure I so much cared about the psychic aspects of this book because what was more important to me was how Jess dealt with her new powers and all the responsibility that came with them. Oh, and punching Jeff Day for calling her best friend Ruth fat. 'It's all Ruth's fault.' That's Jess' statement about everything that happened, from getting struck by lightning, gaining mysterious psychic powers leading her to find missing kids, and getting tangled up with the FBI.

When Lightning Strikes by Meg Cabot