 |
| Taken from Google Images |
Author- Libba Bray
Series- The Diviners
Published- 2015
Page Count- 613 pages
Publishing House- Little Brown Books
Rating- 4/5 stars
About the Author
Libba Bray is the New York Times bestselling author of The Gemma Doyle trilogy (A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing); the Michael L. Printz Award-winning Going Bovine; Beauty Queens, an L.A. Times Book Prize finalist; and The Diviners series. She is originally from Texas but makes her home in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband, son, and two sociopathic cats. You can find her at…oh, wait. You already did. Nevermind—you are a genius!
Taken from Libba's website.
The Plot
After a supernatural showdown with a serial killer, Evie O'Neill has outed herself as a Diviner. Now that the world knows of her ability to "read" objects, and therefore, read the past, she has become a media darling, earning the title, "America's Sweetheart Seer." But not everyone is so accepting of the Diviners' abilities...
Meanwhile, mysterious deaths have been turning up in the city, victims of an unknown sleeping sickness. Can the Diviners descend into the dreamworld and catch a killer?
Meanwhile, mysterious deaths have been turning up in the city, victims of an unknown sleeping sickness. Can the Diviners descend into the dreamworld and catch a killer?
Taken from Goodreads.
Opinions
If for some reason you haven't read my review of The Diviners, then click here to read it.
After finishing The Diviners and being totally swept away by it, I had to get my hands on the remaining books in the series. I would say that I picked the best time to read this series as there are no more agonising waits for books to come out. This book is a beast of a book at 613 pages yet I read it in three days. Why? Because I love this world and these characters so much. It was so good to be back with them, even though I had only just finished the first book. Libba's writing just invites you to keep on reading and to want to know what happens next.
In this book, compared to the first one, the main perspective shifts away from Evie. Evie was one of the reasons I fell in love with this series and at first I was sad that we weren't getting as much page time from her as we had been. Then I realised that the main character in this book was Henry and I totally fell for him. He is the sweetest little bean ever and I will protect him at all costs. If anything bad happens to him, I will be very angry at Libba (though not really). It was also finally confirmed that Henry is gay and why he had ended up in New York. Learning about his backstory made me want to crawl into the book and give him the biggest hug. He's just so nice and to have had all these things happen to him made me very sad. I think I've expressed enough how much I adore Henry DuBois IV. He's the best. He's in a league of his own now.
A bit of a pet peeve of mine is the love square developing between Sam, Jericho, Evie and Mabel in this book. At the end of the last book, Evie kissed Jericho and I was okay with it as they did make a good if unlikely couple. But now Evie and Sam are fake dating but also might be falling in love? That just didn't sit well with me. I feel sorry for Mabel, even though she does annoy me at times. I'm hoping it resolves itself soon as I'm now torn about who Evie should end up with. It also bothered me a bit as Sam and Jericho have a great dynamic and they do not need a girl ruining that. The banter between the two of them is top notch.
Something I've spotted with this series is that it does take quite a while to get to the central mystery. I didn't mind it as much when I was listening to The Diviners on audiobook, but I really wanted to get to the central mystery quicker this time. It felt like it took half of the book to get there and then it wasn't until the last quarter that all the pieces fell into place. Maybe I'm just very impatient and can't wait for things, but it could have been a little bit quicker. It's the only reason I took my rating down from 4.5 to 4 stars as I just wanted to get to the mystery element straight away.
One of the things I did love about this book was finally seeing the "squad", for want of a better word, coming together. They all knew each other in various ways but seeing them come together as one big group was so satisfying. I also really enjoyed the new addition of Ling to the group. She does not take any nonsense from the group and is 100% the sensible one to put them all in their place. Her relationship with Henry is so sweet and wholesome. The character relationships and dynamics that have been built up in this series are some of the best I've read about. Normally I hate this many perspectives in a book, but this cast of characters is the berries, to use a term of endearment from the book.
I'm halfway through the third book as I write this and I can't wait to see what Libba does with the story. I have a feeling that something bad is going to happen to one of my favourites and I will be devastated if it does. No doubt I will be writing reviews for the third and fourth books once I've read them. If you're a fan of The Diviners series, then stick around for more content about them.
Carenza :) x
